International Journal of Social Science Research (IJSSR)

Kabaka’s Lake and Climate Change in Central Uganda: An Urban Geographical Analysis of a Threatened Water Body and its Sustainable Development Implications

Urban water bodies across Sub-Saharan Africa sit at the intersection of climate-driven hydrological stress and rapid demographic change. This systematic integrative review examines Kabaka's Lake — Uganda's largest man-made lake, constructed in the 1880s under Kabaka Mwanga II and located in Kampala's Lubaga Division beside St Lawrence University — as a microcosm of the compound pressures facing spring-fed urban lakes across Central Uganda's Lake Victoria catchment. Drawing on peer-reviewed hydrological, climatological, limnological, and governance literature, the review traces a single evidence chain: regional warming of up to 1.5°C since 1960 and increasingly convective rainfall have destabilised the groundwater recharge on which the lake depends; a 78.5% increase in built-up area and a 92.2% contraction of the receiving wetland over 25 years have stripped away the catchment's natural filtration capacity; and the resulting nutrient loading has left the lake nitrogen-limited and algae-dominated, with Secchi transparency of 0.1–0.5 m signalling incipient eutrophic stress and a modelled transition to eutrophic status within approximately 25 years absent intervention. These findings map directly onto SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 15 (Life on Land), and the review identifies fragmented, weakly enforced governance — rather than an absence of formal policy — as the principal barrier to implementation. Distinctively, the review leverages the lake's adjacency to a Faculty of Education to propose an integrated catchment stewardship model that couples decentralised wastewater treatment, wetland restoration, and permanent water-quality monitoring with a multi-semester, place-based teacher-education curriculum built around the same evidence base. The review concludes that the sustainable management of spring-fed urban water bodies in Central Uganda requires simultaneous, coordinated action across hydrological monitoring, wetland restoration, governance reform, and pedagogical innovation — with Kabaka's Lake positioned as a living laboratory through which pre-service teachers can engage directly with climate-responsive sustainability.