Death of the Nile? (15 min short version)
A film by Andy Johnstone
Producer: Wild Dog Limted 2009
Script (edited 7/12/09)
EXT. NILE RIVER AT JINJA
GV's river & communities
V/O (00.00.07.00)
Flowing north from it's most
southerly source in Lake Victoria,
the Nile is a great artery,
supporting the lives and
livelihoods of some 180 million
people. Roughly one third of the
entire population of the African
continent lives in the Nile river
basin.
Uganda, is just one of ten
countries that depend on the river.
But climate change means that this
environment, which has sustained people
for thousands of years, is
changing. Fast.
EXT. VILLAGE NEAR JINJA
Woman washing pots outside a village hut/house. Cut to woman making
lunch & then family having lunch.
FRANK MURAMUZI (00.00.49.00)
The river is where the poor people
get water for drinking, for
cooking, for washing, for building
houses. Secondly it is this river
where people get fish and if fish
disappears, then the livelihoods of
the poor people will be affected.
FRANK MURAMUZI (CONT)
Some of these people use water for
irrigation, like in Egypt, like in
Sudan and even in Uganda and if
that water is no longer there the
people will suffer.
ELLIOT (00.01.29.00)
Todays lunch, we have fish, dry
fish and 'posho' cassava flour. So
sweet. Ejoyaful. Lisa you eat. Why
you not eating.
ELLIOT (CONT)
The extra fish we catch, part of it
we sell, part of it we dry and we
keep it, because we don't have
fridge, that's why we always dry
them, we use sunshine and slat in
it. This fish they cook like
this... this dry fish we just set
fire and we put cold water into the
pot, pour what we need and after
pouring water we just put our dried
fish in it, without any cooking
oil, onions and the rest. This
fish, very early in the morning, I
always go to the river, river Nile
INTERVIEWER (00.02.36.00)
Have you Heard Much about Climate
Change?
ELLIOT (00.02.40.00)
Climate change? I never heard of
that...
Kids running and playing in the street. GV's Village etc.
V/O (00.02.45.00)
Elliot lives in a mud hut on the
edges of society, so it is not
extraordinary that he and his
family know nothing about climate change.
But elsewhere in Uganda, there are
communities that are better
informed - because climate change
is already affecting their lives.
EXT ROAD TO MT ELGON
Car sweeps up the road towards Mt Elgon, where Uganda's best coffee
is produced.
WILLIAM ODINGA (00.03.19.00)
I'm on my way up Mt Elgon to
interview Wagoire, William director
of the Buginyanya Agricultural
research Institute. The roads are
rough, I've had to stop many tims
for the directions but I know we'll
get there!
Car sweeps up mountain - stunning views etc.
V/O (00.03.36.00)
Mt Elgon rises to over 2000m and
lies to the east of Uganda on the
border with Kenya. William has come
here to find out more about climate change
and how it is affecting Uganda's
main cash crop. Coffee.
People picking and processing coffee.
V/O (00.03.53.00)
The Coffee business is crucial to
this developing economy, supporting
hundreds of people in local
communities. But, the Arabica coffee
thrives in the cool, highlands of
Mt Elgon is under threat from
rising global temperatures. This
changing climate brings with it an
increase in pests and disease.
DR CARLO BUONTEMPO (00.04.16.00)
The effect of climate change on
agriculture is incredibly complex,
because on one side, especially in
some areas, a beneficial effect of
increased temperatures, which
means an increase in the length
of the growing season. On the
other side you have some critical
threshold can be exceeded, and
depending on plants, different
crops have different critical
thresholds, but if you exceed that
critical threshold the plant just
dies.
Wagoire and Odinga visit coffee plantation.
DR WILLIAM WAGOIRE (00.04.51.00)
Here we are in a coffee "shamba"
and here you can have a look at how beautiful
a well managed coffee field looks
like...These are the coffee berries,
ready for picking...When all of
them are ripe to this extent, this
is the farmer's pride! Whne he
looks at this he knows is out of
the poverty line.
Assistant leans across and grabs a leaf.
DR WILLIAM WAGOIRE (00.05.04 .00)
Actually this is a beautiful
example of "leaf rust". You can see
it attacks also on the underside of
the leaf and you see how... do you
call that yellow or what ever it
is? Orange? So the whole leaf is
going to be covered with that and
with that colouration, there is no
way the plant can photosynthesize
to make food for the plant.
EXT. LOWER DOWN THE MOUNTAIN
V/O (00.05.35.00)
Further down the mountain the next
day, William has an appointment
with a retired diplomat, Wamimbi
Weasa, who now grows trees and farms
a small holding.
Wamimbi & Odinga shake hands.
EXT. WAMIMBI'S PORCH
WAMIMBI WEASA
Mr Wiliam Odinga, you are very much
welcome to my home.
(WILLIAM ODINGA (00.05.47.00)
Have you noticed any effects of
climate change over the past few
years?
WAMIMBI WEASA (00.06.05.25)
Very much so Mr Odinga. In this
part where you are, here in Masabaland,
there were no mosquitoes during my
younger days. Until the 70's or 80's
all of the sub-county was mosquito
free. But because of the high
temperatures the mosquitoes have
invaded us.
William write notes.
WAMIMBI CONT./(00.06.28.04)
Of course with the invasion of
mosquitoes there is a lot of malaria
cases these days. Even more than
in those areas where mosquitoes
were prevelant in those days.
WILLIAM ODINGA
This area was also popular for
bananas.
WAMIMBI
Yes so the banana wilt is on with
us, but we are trying to eradicate
it, or at least reduce it, so we
can go back to good production
Walk to banana grove.
WAMIMBI
So William the signs of this banana
bacterial wilt, begin like this,
with yellow leaves. So the wilt
might have been there, but the change,
the climate change, might have been
a quickening process of increasing this
disease. So it has also affected
the economy of this area of Uganda.
Walks off...
WAMIMBI
And I am planting new ones and I
can see a positive change.
EXT. LAKE VICTORIA
V/O (00.07.21.29)
But while communities in Uganda
have already begun to experience
climate change, understanding more
about the potential long term
effects of for the Nile is another
issue.
CARLO BUONTEMPO (00.07.30.10)
I mean, it is always difficult to
make a prediction on long term
climate change, because the only
way we can do it is to prescribe
the concentration of greenhouse
gases into a global circulation
model, so a model describing the
global climate and look at how this
model describes the average climate
in a few years time. And for a certain
part of the globe, different
models, models developed by different
scientific communities agrees on
the trend. Like on the
Mediterranean we know that
especially during the summer it is
going to be drier and hotter. And
so we are quite confident that on
the higher part of the Nile, close to
the delta, it is going to be much
drier during the summer and much warmer.
If you go further south, actually
different models predict different
situations and you are not that
certain about what is going to
happen.
V/O (00.08.17.21)
But new evidence from a research
project in Ethiopia, may provide
climate scientists with a better
understanding of the Nile's future.
EXT. LAKE TANA, ETHIOPIA
GV's lake Tana, Ethiopia & Blue Nile falls.
INT. HENRY LAMB'S LAB, ABERYSTWYTH
HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA)(00.08.26.24)
Well we'd been working in Ethiopia
for some years looking at smaller
lakes when we realised that noone
had done any work on Lake Tana, despite
the fact that it is the source of
one of the most important rivers in the
world, the Blue Nile.
HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA CONT.)
(00.08.37.20)
Initially we got some funding to
look at the idea that there had
been a drought 4,200 years ago that
had caused the collapse of the old
kingdom in Egypt. And since the
Ethiopian highlands are the source
of the water that feeds Egypt, it
makes a lot of sense to go to the
source of the Blue Nile, to Lake Tana
and see if we can find geological
evidence for that event.
HENRY LAMB (00.09.01.00)
When we did our coring, we chose
the deepest part of the lake 12m,
14m deep...and almost the last core contained
a very dramatic brown peaty
sediment, the sort of peat you get
out of a bog here. And a bog of
course is a terrestrial material,
not the sort of material that you
find in a lake. So we pulled this
core out and thought, "My goodness
here we are in business, this must
mean a dramatic lowering of lake levels,
it must mean the lake dried out in
the past." We thought that it was going
to be the 4,200 year event, but
when we got it back to the lab, its
much older, its 16,000 years old.
HENRY LAMB (TO CAMERA IN LAB)
(00.09.37.00)
Here is the clay layer, the stiff
clay which represents the dried out
lake surface at about 16,000 years
ago and from here up is the dark material,
very dark peaty material which is
deposited in a swamp a papyrus swamp.
Lamb takes core sample to testing machine.
HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA)(00.09.56.22)
That peaty sample represents the
interval of the lake beginning to
fill up after a probably a major
drought event about 16,000 years ago,
a drought event which affected
pretty much all of Africa and is
connected to what was going on in
the Atlantic.
HENRY LAMB (00.10.10.18)
We think the ice sheet in the North
Atlantic collapsed at that time,
sending an armada of ice bergs and
melt water across the Atlantic ocean,
warming up the oceans and reducing
the temperature pressure contrast
that drives the monsoon. So the
monsoon broke down and the rains
failed, probably for a couple of
hundred years or more.
HENRY LAMB (00.10.33.00)
Putting together the geological
evidence that we have from Lake
Tana, the source of the Blue Nile
and also the earlier evidence from
Lake Victoria and Lake Albert the
source of the White Nile, the
evidence is that all of those lakes
dried up some 16,000 years ago,
stayed dry or filled up gradually
until they overflowed 14,700 years
ago. So we can make this dramatic statement
that for that period of time, the
Nile itself was effectively dry, it
had dried to a trickle.
HENRY LAMB (00.11.17.00)
The concern is that with the
climate changing as rapidly as it
is now, with global warming, the
Greenland ice-sheet may behave in
the same way. In fact there is good
evidence that the Greenland ice
sheet is beginning to move rapidly
and perhaps collapse within the
next few decades and if that
happens it would undoubtedly lead
to a flood of fresh water into the
North Atlantic and might well affect
the current flows through the North
Atlantic and eventually the African Monsoon
too.
EXT. RIVER NILE, JINJA
Elliot and friend walk down to the river to fix their boat.
V/O (00.11.54.03)
Back on the Nile at Jinja in
Uganda, Eliot main concern is a
hole in his fishing boat.
ELLIOT (00.12.00.00)
This boat has got some problem when
we are trying to fish somewhere
that way and we knocked a certain
stone inside the water. That's why
we got a small accident anyway
INTERVIEWER (00.12.20.00)
Is it going to take long to fix it?
ELLIOT (00.12.22.00)
This will not take long. After a
short time we shall go in.
ELLIOT (00.12.38.00)
Yes our boats fantastic, its very
strong we can make it.
V/O (00.12 .42.00)
While Elliot fixes his boat, to
prepare him self for another days
fishing, the big question is "if
the Nile has run dry before for
1300 years, as Henry Lamb's
research in Lake Tana suggests,
could it run dry again and might
this process already begun"?
LUCAS NDAWULA (00.13.00.00)
In 2006 and part of 2007, we had
low water levels here and all this
vast area that you are seeing here
was laid bare.
LUCAS NDAWULA (00.13.15.00)
At the bottom here you find nest s
of Talapia. These nests are the
ones hat are built by the male
Talapia and they are used by
females to deposit their eggs and
for the eggs to get fertilised and
if this is laid bare then this
means that this activity, this very
very important breeding activity
cannot take place. And definitely
that one will affect the stocks of
that fish species and all the
communities who depend upon it.
V/O (00.13.46.00)
According recent reports from
Sudan, the Nile has been at one of
its lowest levels for over a
century.
DECLAN CONWAY (00.13.53.00)
What we are concerned about is
potentially rapid and extreme changes
occurring in the future because of
global climate change. There is scientific
evidence from lake cores and
environmental reconstructions that these
part of the world have seen humid
periods, so it has been much wetter than
it is now, but they have also seen
much much drier periods and during
those times what we see is rivers
drying up, lakes drying out and
massive environmental changes, over
quite vast periods of time.
DECLAN CONWAY (00.14.30.00)
We now have very different
circumstance, we now have millions more
people living in the region and
their livelihoods and the national economies
are very dependent on the
availability of water and the
ability to be able to grow crops.
So if changes occur over the next
10, 20, 30 years in the future, then
they will have absolutely dramatic
consequences.
ELLIOT (00.14.52.00)
Tomorrow morning I will going for
fishing. I have already
completed repairing my boat and the
boats now very strong. Now we shall
be able to at least to catch
something from the river Nile,
where we always survive from. And
then maybe int he evening, I will
be going for some leisure time,
maybe take a bit of booze somewher
over "Mabo". Yeah...this is what i
will do. Hmmmm.
- ENDS -
© Andy Johnstone, Wild Dog Limited 2009
www.wilddogworld.com +44 207 193 4277