 Over 90% of Uganda's population relies on biomass, specifically charcoal and firewood as their main source of energy for cooking. The high demand for wood fuel puts pressure on forests and other woodlands, affecting the environment, the people and the planet, and accelerating climate change. Although Uganda's long-term goal is to progressively shift to cleaner energy, biomass energy remains core in Uganda's energy mix. This is mainly because of limited availability and affordability of alternatives, such as electricity, gas and biogas. Sustainable production and utilization of wood energy is therefore crucial for meeting energy needs of the Ugandan population for current and future generations. Germany landscape is around 31,000 square kilometers out of this. We have a forest cover of at least 25% originally, that's our forest cover, but to date there has been a number of challenges, pressures to these natural estates, and we have at least contributed to 15% loss in our forest cover. And that's a very big loss, and we think efforts that have been in place have not been adequate enough in terms of the scale of the intervention. But when partners like FAO come in to support efforts of government, we really welcome such interventions. With support from the European Union and the Embassy of Sweden in Kampala, FAO is working with the government of Uganda to increase access to clean energy, empower rural communities to address climate change, and tackle the negative impacts of charcoal production in Uganda. The overall goal for this project is actually to mitigate climate change impacts by addressing the environmental and social issues that come out of unsustainable practices. The key poor practices actually, the first one is that we are producing charcoal without plants. So there is no, the harvesting of charcoal is not regulated. So people are still using the traditional earth kilns, and those ones are associated with raw recoveries. So are the projects to introduce better technologies like castamanser kilns, which are able to give us better recoveries and are associated with low greenhouse gas emissions. Making the charcoal value chain more sustainable requires implementation of effective policies and legal frameworks to monitor and regulate the sub-sector. Previously we had laws that maintained and sustained the environment. The district ordinance is very clear, particularly on the environment. One of it is saying, when you cut one tree, you must plan the five. So this one will come to enforce even more on our district ordinance. And we also passed a law that governs the production of charcoal, taking into consideration that our livelihood depends on the charcoal. But how we maintain it and how we cut it, how we bring it to our daily activities is a matter that we are debating upon. To help advance Uganda's transition to cleaner energy, FAO is promoting production and access to alternatives such as briquettes made from wood waste, as well as energy-saving stoves to reduce reliance on charcoal and address climate change. I think the use of carbonized briquettes and biomass briquettes should be the way for Uganda for the following reasons. One, all these briquettes, they use already cut trees. Even maize cobs or whatever, you can use them. Secondly, they protect the environment. Instead of cutting more trees, you don't cut those very many trees, but you use already those that have been cut and which were wasted. Some of the sawdust I get it from Kampara does a timber. But when they are printing it, they are producing those residues, which can be thrown, can be burnt, but I bring it here for manufacturing of these briquettes so that it can be used. So it is good to go for Uganda, for Africa, for the world in order to protect the environment. Through the GCCA Plus project, FAO is empowering rural communities in most vulnerable districts to identify and adapt to climate change through interventions that promote food security and sustainable livelihoods. FAO is helping rural farming households to use green energy by acquiring solar power cooking stoves, which use mostly volcanic stones to produce heat and energy. The EU still has green economy, sustainable economy as a priority area of intervention. Specifically to forestry, we are looking at developing forestry partnership, which is an approach, a framework that allows for holistic intervention, holistic dialogue within the forestry sector. With the changing climate, rural communities, especially women's groups that depend on agricultural production systems in Karamoja and West Nile regions, are receiving support to improve their resilience to climate change and improve their economic well-being. This project basically has three components. The first one is looking at women's access to and control the productive resources. Under that we basically look at the productive resources that help women at household level in terms of production and productivity, which in a way women have, I mean they have challenged access to some of these resources. So this project is trying to strengthen the capacity of women and empower them in a way that they can have equal access to some of those productive resources like land, forest resources and also even other productive assets at household level. The reason why we support women is that first of all we know that climate change is a reality in Uganda and we know that women are the most affected when it comes to climate change. We very well know that 70% of women are employed in agriculture and agriculture is one of the most impacted sectors when it comes to climate change. And we also know that women already are burdened with caregiving activities. So when we have climate change impacts then we know we are adding more stress and more work for example, collecting water, collecting firewood. So we see more impacts on women when we have climate change.