An eleventh-hour legal effort is underway to halt the completion of a 900-mile oil pipeline through key African wildlife habitats. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) is weeks from being ready to operate, but the full range of ecological impacts from the pipeline and the two oil fields in Uganda that it will serve are only now becoming clear.

A key concern is the likely threat to Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park, where the French energy giant TotalEnergies is set to begin producing oil in October. The park is one of Africa’s greatest havens for wildlife, Uganda’s last stronghold for around 240 lions, a critical link in an elephant migration corridor stretching into South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and home to large populations of giraffes, buffalo, crocodiles, and hippos.

A second oil field is also ready to begin production on the eastern shore of nearby Lake Albert. The oil from both will be delivered to world markets via the pipeline, which stretches from Uganda across neighboring Tanzania to the Indian Ocean.

The project is moving forward despite a years-long campaign that marshaled major banks and insurers against it, and despite revelations of the intimidation, harassment, and abuse of people living in its path.

“Where there were once unbroken vistas of savannah, there are now bulldozed roads and the gleam of an oil rig’s lights.”

The world’s oil consumers are keen to see a new source of oil come online that is not dependent on the militarized Strait of Hormuz. But campaigners are planning to make a last legal challenge in courts in London, where EACOP Ltd, the company largely owned by TotalEnergies that is in charge of the pipeline, is registered. Next month, they are expected to claim that its operation will breach the laws and constitution of Uganda.

Murchison Falls National Park was first gazetted as a game reserve by British colonial authorities exactly a century ago, in 1926, and made a national park in 1952. At its heart is one of Africa’s most dramatic waterfalls, where the River Nile bursts through a narrow gorge and creates a spectacular delta wetland before entering Lake Albert, Africa’s seventh largest lake, on the border between Uganda and the DRC.

Read the full article about the crude oil pipeline through East Africa by Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360.