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I AM writing this in Uganda, during a visit to a research project on banded mongooses in Queen Elizabeth National Park. It is a privilege to be here – the wildlife is astonishing, the people I’ve met wonderful and the scenery incredible. You may know that my wife Clare died recently. This trip is about getting stories, but it is also helping me to deal with my loss. Life-affirming doesn’t do it justice.

Uganda is proud of its wildlife, and rightly so. The mission of the is to preserve biodiversity for the people of Uganda – and the global community. Long may it continue. This is what a properly biodiverse landscape looks like. For someone from a nature-denuded country like the UK, being here offers a glimpse of what the world must have looked like before we declared war on the natural environment in a quest for unlimited prosperity. Uganda is reaping the rewards of its efforts by attracting international eco-tourism. It costs serious money to visit the parks. But the beer is still cheap and the food is too.

However, Uganda is also on the front line of climate change. The rainy season ought to have ended by now, but hasn’t. A waiter in the nearby safari lodge told us that it used to rain once a day for a couple of hours. Now it rains many times a day, often biblically, and at unpredictable times. A few days ago we visited the world-famous , part of the system, a landscape created by tectonic activity. After a 3-hour trek through dense jungle in search of chimpanzees, we had to turn back because the river was unusually swollen. Crestfallen, we walked back. But the despondency didn’t last long. We saw the chimps near the car park.

The national park also has problems with invasive species. According to warden Raymond Kato, 40 per cent of the park is being swallowed by non-native plants and efforts to eradicate them have failed. A huge recent decline in an antelope called the Ugandan kob may be caused by shifts in vegetation. The mongooses are also challenged by the denser bush.

A visit to Uganda from the UK gives a glimpse of what the world was like before we declared war on nature

Of course, I had to fly here from the UK. So did the two people I came with, mongoose researchers from the University of Exeter’s campus in Penryn, Cornwall. I haven’t flown long-haul for many years and I feel guilty about my contribution to the climate crisis.

This kind of long-haul flight is a hot topic among researchers in Uganda. Universities in the UK and elsewhere are increasingly discouraging staff and students from taking them. Ecology undergraduates used to be offered field trips to Borneo, Costa Rica and other far-flung places. Now, they mostly go to Europe.

The mongoose project – which over the past 27 years has made groundbreaking discoveries about the evolution of co-operation and conflict in social species, with direct relevance to humans – wouldn’t be possible without long-haul flights. The project is run on a day-to-day basis by Ugandan scientists and field assistants. But the research funding, publications and scientific ideas come from the UK. To keep the project running, the principal investigators have to visit a couple of times a year, not least to discuss with field workers what hypotheses to test next.

The lead scientists will keep on flying here. But the next generation of Western field biologists is increasingly being denied the opportunity to work in places like Uganda. Aspiring conservation biologists need to visit the places where nature remains at baseline levels or they can’t fully understand their subject. But anecdotally, I hear that Western research funding is increasingly focused on local projects and that scientists’ horizons are narrowing.

This isn’t just bad for European and North American scientists, but also for researchers in places like Uganda. There is no doubt that Ugandans could do the work independently, but their education system and scientific infrastructure are still in need of development and money. There aren’t the facilities here to do DNA sequencing, for example – samples crucial for the mongoose project have to be sent to Europe.

A lot of this is about how things look rather than how things really are. Academic institutions should take the lead on important social and environmental issues such as carbon emissions, but scaling back long-haul flights to important research projects is ultimately counterproductive.

is imperfect, but when done properly it can be used to make long-haul flights net zero – I’ll do this once I’m home. But nothing can offset the loss of international conservation biology collaboration where biodiversity still exists.

For me, the experience has been invaluable and life-changing. Uganda, the pearl of Africa, I salute you. Thank you for letting me visit your country. My horizons are now as broad as your skies.

Graham Lawton is a staff writer at 91av and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton