Lightning talk on climate resilience and WikiForHumanRights Uganda: transcript

Key points

• Natural reservoirs that absorb heat have been destroyed by human activity, which has destabilized natural systems and driven climate change.
• The Ugandan campaign aimed to provide reliable information on human rights and climate issues, and also covered SDG 5 on gender equality.
• It ran as a hybrid event with a virtual launch and in-person sessions, reaching around 38 participants and creating over 299 pages.
• Factual, neutral information matters because of widespread misinformation and disinformation.
• Editathons, community events and collaboration with national bodies such as NEMA, Uganda's environment management authority, were key.
• A challenge was that many people see human rights as not their interest; he closes by calling climate literacy the first step in protecting the planet.

Chapters

1. 0:01Climate change and the role of Wikimedians
2. 1:19Campaign format and results in Uganda
3. 1:49Lessons: neutral information and collaboration
4. 3:06Challenges and call for climate literacy

Full transcript

0:01Chris, please come and tell us about climate resilience in Uganda. In true lightening spirit, I want to see those who believe that the earth was created by a supernatural being. Okay? I want to see those who believe the Big Bang Theory. All right. So no matter what you believe, we know that the world was created with systems to absorb the heat.

0:39Those are reservoirs. However, we see that they have been destroyed by human activity. And that has caused an increase in heat and destabilized the natural system leading to climate change. What are we supposed to do about it as Wikimedians? Present new and factual information available for free. And this is what we've done in Uganda. Our campaign aimed to ensure reliable information on human rights and climate issues.

1:19We focused on those SDGs. I won't run through all of them. We also included... SDG5 for gender equality. It was hybrid. We ensured that the launch was virtual, but we had in-person sessions. That's our dashboard. We reached around 38 participants and created over 299 pages.

1:49We had new editors and that's a few happy faces. You may have seen some here on the Wikimania. So, what did we learn? What can you pick from this? It is very key that there is factual and neutral information about human rights and climate change. because we all know that we are in a century where we have a lot of misinformation, disinformation, and all the wrong informations out there.

2:25And also, of course, it's very key that you provide Edithathon's community events and collaborate with national bodies. I think collaboration has been repeated over and over again. We collaborated with NEMA, the Ugandan body in charge of environment management. And, like we've sung here over and over again, SDG 5, engage females to close the gender gap. However, we had a challenge. When people hear human rights, they're like, hmm, that's not my cup of tea.

3:06encourage most people to participate in this in these topics because we know how important it is to have information about climate change finally it is very key for us as the comedians to provide open knowledge and power so that we create inspiring knowledge so that the communities can access information to contribute to a sustainable future. We have one planet, the only thing we can do is protect it and the very first state is climate literacy. Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Climate Resilience through Knowledge - Lightning Talk - Wikimania Day 3 - Nairobi.webm by Christopher Liberty (2025-08-08), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.