In 2023, during a Regenerative Development Design course, we were asked to envision a place in a regenerative future state. What I saw in my mind was vivid: Nalubaaga wetland and her people in beautiful reciprocal relation — the wetland nourishing people, people nourishing the wetland. It was so alive and energising that I couldn't let it pass. So we started convening residents, landowners, and listening to the land and culture.

Two years of listening have grounded that image into an insight: the climate crisis, in places like Kiwaatule, is not, at its root, about excess carbon. It is a symptom of relations we once held with care but have since dropped — between humans and nature, between communities and their ecosystems, and between our economic systems and the living world.

The regenerative imperative is therefore not to capture more carbon but to restore these dropped relations, one at a time.

In Kiwaatule, Kampala, one such dropped relation is visible every morning. Nalubaaga — a wetland valley whose springs once fed five districts — now chokes on waste. There was no language for ‘waste’ because material flows were circular by intuition, each step of the cycle nourishing the next. A century of colonial land fragmentation turned her 530-acre catchment into thousands of individually fenced plots, leaving each landowner facing Nalubaaga’s decline alone.

Together with landowner, we formed the Nalubaaga Valley Community - a Distributed Stewarding Cooperative, with Nalubaaga wetland as a formal shareholder, and shareholding by land - not capital.

On 6 April 2026, landstewards and the wetland made their first collective land decision in over a century. See more here. They chose to begin with healing the Residents ⇋ Waste relation — the wound people touch with their own hands every morning.

Over the next six months, we are running a community-led waste governance cycle: residents, elders, youth, informal waste collectors, and Nalubaaga's own ecological intelligence reshaping together material flows through our place.

By year's end we should have restored the cycle from waste to nourishment: community-designed waste-to-value enterprises including composting for urban farming, upcycling plastics into artful building materials and interior design, restore mycelium function in soil, and other livelihoods. All running on cooperatively held land, and wetland buffer zones under collective stewardship for the first time.

What is unique about our work is that Nalubaaga is not the object of this work — she is a participant in it - participating alongside landstewards in quadratic decision-making on what gets done here.