The author weaves a story of failing crops, rising seas, climate changes impacting rainfall, wasted time and money from GEF, groundwater mining, and salinization, or salt intrusion, into the soil and millions at risk.
The area in question was once a very productive agricultural center. Combined natural processes altered or exacerbated by man have led to much agricultural land being sold off for development, as I saw in the suburbs of Cairo earlier this year. Climate change is partially to blame, but also freshwater flows and sediment deposition reduced after commissioning of the High Aswan Dam in the 1970s, as well as groundwater mining for commercial farming cause loss of land and subsidence, or sinking, of land.
The Aswan Dam caused sediment transport in the Nile to reduce to zero percent. This has had poorly understood impacts on the shifting delta. Freshwater flows are successful in flushing out salt water in a delta system, salt water is heavier and denser than fresh water.
are dealing with similar salt water intrusion issues and land subsidence.
however the question is not so much farming as it is citylife. Many of the ground-floor apartments and businesses have had to move. Sea level rise coupled with groundwater extraction and reduced river flows may spell the end to productive land and carrying capacity in the world's deltas. Deltas that are and have traditionally been areas of high population volume and development.
The questions in the Nile about water sharing and upstream water development may mean Egypt turns more often to groundwater pumping to sustain parts of its population of 80 million. More aggressive groundwater pumping will lead to more land subsidence, more saltwater intrusion. Challenges such as these are important for Egypt to consider in negotiations with upstream countries and spearheading a Nile-wide basin development and water management plan.
Abdullah Salam walks up and down his narrow plot,
tossing fistfuls of wheat seeds with a light flick of his wrist as the
soil squishes beneath his bare feet. “
Elhamdullillah,” he says—praise God—a strong rain just came through and softened the ground. A month ago, this earth was as hard as asphalt.
These
days, it feels to Salam like his soil is fighting him. It’s quick to
dry out, turning hard and gray. The seeds don’t seem to like it: No
matter how much money he spends on fertilizers, he’s getting slightly
lower yields every harvest. And no matter how much he irrigates the
land, it’s always thirsty. Always.
But
there’s nothing to be done about it, and there’s no one to complain to
here in Kafr el-Sheikh, in the center of Egypt’s Nile Delta, so Salam
carries on planting. He, his wife and his 15-year-old son, Mohammed,
scatter the wheat seeds around his 2-acre field. Their neighbor then
drives his tractor through it, tilling the soil and pushing the seeds
deep into the ground. Once that’s done, they all have tea and wait.
“The harvest will be in five or six months,
inshallah [God willing],” Salam says. “One [acre] used to yield 18 or 20
ardab
[worth about $1,000]. But now we’ll probably only get 10.” Salam will
sell half of that at market for about $250, and the other half his wife
will mill into flour and bake into bread. But it’s nearly impossible to
make such a small amount of flour stretch until the next harvest, she
says.
This land, where the Nile spreads out to meet the sea, once
grew enough wheat to feed everyone from Cairo to Rome—the breadbasket of
the world, they called it. Today, the delta barely feeds the farmers
who cultivate it. Salam blames his diminishing returns on rising
fertilizer prices and bad luck.
But it’s not bad luck—it’s the sea. It’s warming, rising and
expanding onto the low-lying, delta lands and seeping into the water
that feeds them. By the end of the century,
60 percent of the delta region—including Salam’s field—will be so saturated with salt as to be barely farmable. As much as
20 percent of this once-fertile land will be covered in water. When this happens,
two-thirds of Egypt’s food will drown and two-thirds of the country’s
population will be left homeless and hungry.
The Salt Shakedown
Sadek
Mahmoud has been working the plot next to Salam’s for 65 years. He
remembers when the Nile used to flood his irrigation canals every year
with clear, nutrient-rich water. “I used to drink from the Nile right
here. And I never ever got sick,” Mahmoud says.
For centuries,
farmers relied solely on the Nile to water their cropland, digging a
complex network of irrigation canals to connect the entire delta region
to the river and its tributaries. But as Egypt’s population has soared,
so has its water consumption; and as factories, power plants and
megacities have emerged along the Nile’s banks, the clear, rich water of
Mahmoud’s youth has been fouled by all manner of human, chemical and
industrial waste. Nowadays, by the time the Nile reaches Salam and
Mahmoud’s fields, it has been reduced to a brown, toxic trickle.
To
compensate, the farmers in the area have dug a well. Salam and Mahmoud,
along with about a dozen of their neighbors, take turns running a
fuel-powered pump to flood their respective irrigation canals with water
from the
Nile Delta aquifer,
a massive underground reservoir, spanning from Cairo to the
Mediterranean Sea. On the surface, this seems like a good solution to
the delta’s water shortage problem, but this sort of pumping is
accelerating the region’s demise, according to Badr Mabrouk, a hydrology
professor at Zagazig University. “When you draw the water up from the
deep aquifers, it creates pressure and it draws the sea in,” Mabrouk
said.
Rising sea levels had already put the Nile Delta aquifer in
peril before farmers began deep-well pumping, Mabrouk explained, but
they have made it worse. The way coastal aquifers work is that they meet
and hold back the sea underground at a point called the transition
zone: The higher density saltwater sinks and gets pulled back toward the
ocean and the freshwater remains on top. As long as sea levels—and
aquifer levels—remain stable, this meeting point doesn’t move.
But if either the sea rises or the fresh water recedes,
this point moves farther inland: The sea advances underground. In the
case of the Nile Delta, both are happening and they’re happening
quickly, Mabrouk said. As the ocean warms and its waters expand, sea
levels in Egypt are rising, and the land is sinking at a rate of 0.1
inches per year as a result, according to the
Climate Change Adaptation in Africa Program. Meanwhile, excessive pumping is draining the aquifer faster than rainfall can refill it.
Massive
cement tetrapods lie along the beach in Baltim, on Egypt’s
Mediterranean coast. The huge blocks are a stopgap to prevent erosion,
but the sea is steadily overtaking them. The first stages of this wall
have been almost completely overtaken by sand; only their moss-covered
tops remain visible. Without action, the other rows will soon disappear
as well.
Nicholas Linn for Newsweek
Climate scientists and geologists have been warning
of the danger of saltwater intrusion in Egypt’s Delta for decades. But
in a country riven with political upheaval and economic insecurity, the
environment has never been the government’s priority—and still isn’t,
according to Hassan Husseiny, a water management specialist for the
American University in Cairo’s
Research Institute for Sustainable Environment.
“Studies say climate change could begin to have a real effect after 20
years,” Husseiny says. “The government doesn’t look that far ahead.”
But up in the northern Delta region, sea-level rise is no
longer a matter of looking ahead: On a daily basis, the sea is pounding
away at the populous cities of Alexandria, Damietta and Port Said. If
the sea rises by even 20 inches (which
a 2014 National Climate Assessment projects will likely occur by 2100)
30 percent of Alexandria, a city of 5 million, will be inundated.
In
the popular coastal resort town of Baltim, about 30 miles north of Kafr
el-Sheikh, mango farmer Mossad Abu Ghali has seen the sea advancing. “I
remember when they had to build a new boardwalk because the old one got
ruined by the sea,” Abu Ghali says. “That was a long time ago though.
Inshallah, the sea is not advancing anymore.” Baltim built a seawall in
1992 out of large, concrete tetrapod blocks. This has slowed—but not
stopped—the sea’s advance. This type of structure, known as a
revetment, has an average life span of 30 to 50 years. Already the wall is half-buried in sand.
All
along the coast, cities and towns like Baltim have constructed sea
walls to try and hold back the water, but even with these measures in
place, Husseiny predicted that no fewer than 10 million people would be
displaced in the next 30 years.
The Delta’s Eleventh Hour
In 1972, Egypt launched the Coastal Research Institute (
CORI)
to “monitor and protect” the Egyptian coast, but to date, its work has
focused far more on monitoring than protecting. “There has yet to be any
action taken in the delta that I know of,” Husseiny said. “There have
been conferences and meetings and discussions but no action.”
The
institute’s current flagship program is a joint venture started in 2009
with the United Nations Development Program and Global Environment
Facility. The project is to create “
integrated coastal zone management systems” on Egypt’s coasts by building sea barriers out of natural materials. Six years and
$4 million later,
they have managed to “select a pilot site,” design an “adaptation
technique” and solicit bids from contractors to work on a pilot site—but
have
yet to build a single sea barrier.
Aymen el-Gamal, CORI’s deputy director, works out of an
office less than half a mile from the sea, and he doesn’t deny the sea
levels are rising. But, he says, there is little use in trying to
predict the rate at which it will rise—and there’s no sense in planning
more than one or two years ahead. Most existing models are just
alarmist and unhelpful, el-Gamal says. He’s also unconvinced
human-induced climate change is real. “The Earth is very clever. It can
take in energy and emit it,” el-Gamal says. “There are those who say
there is the greenhouse effect and the ozone—no, the Earth is bigger
than all of this.” His smile is confident and kind. “So the climate
change from my point of view is a normal phenomenon.” Which is why he
sees his role as one of simply monitoring sea-level rise and adapting to
the data as it comes in.
For farmers like Salam, Mahmoud and Abu
Ghali, however, that won’t work. The hour is late for the delta. “The
land is slowly, slowly running out of time,” Mabrouk said. Egypt’s
primary food source is sinking into the sea while its government—and the
international community—watches on.
Global leaders are gearing up
for the landmark COP21 climate change summit in Paris, where they are
hoping to reach consensus on a new set of regulations for greenhouse gas
emissions to replace the current Kyoto Protocol when it expires in
2020. But even the most aggressive of global reforms won’t do a thing to
save Egypt’s Nile Delta. Even if global leaders succeed in their goal
of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial
levels (an ambitious goal to begin with), the seas are expected to
continue rising for decades to come, according to a
report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
Land loss and damage from climate change are on the
agenda
for the summit, but it’s unlikely that Egypt’s case will be discussed
specifically. Ultimately, the United Nations Framework for Climate
Change has left it to individual countries to develop their own
National Adaptation Plans. Egypt’s prime minister formed a
National Committee on Climate Change
in July to draft an up-to-date national strategy for combatting the
problem, but a copy of this strategy has not been made public (if indeed
it has been fully drafted).
In the meantime, there has been
little if any international pressure on Egypt to update its national
strategy expediently. All international critiques of Egypt tend to focus
on the country’s national security problems, human rights abuses and
poor democratic governance. As long as climate change remains a
second-tier issue for the international community, the Egyptian
state—and its people—will also regard it as one.
Even Abu Ghali,
whose mango trees could be floating in saltwater within his lifetime,
believes tackling climate change should come second to tightening
security and restoring the economy. He has full confidence his president
will help him in due time. “The government is under a lot of pressure,”
Abu Ghali says. “We can’t expect everything to come all at once.
[President Abdel-Fattah ] el-Sissi needs to first give jobs to people
who need them. Later, he will help us.” Inshallah.
Partial funding for this piece was provided by the Earth Journalism Network.