By www.sxc.hu More than half of Egypt’s population lives in the Delta and will be directly affected by rising sea levels. More than half of Egypt’s population lives in the Delta and will be directly affected by rising sea levels.

By Michael Ide

F or millennia, Egyptians have fought to prevent occupation of the Delta. Today, the region remains vulnerable to invasion, but the threat is not the Romans or French. It’s the sea itself.

A growing body of evidence suggests that sea levels, fed by the fallout of climate change, could rise by up to 1m in the next century.

That may not seem like much — it’s about the same height as a North Coast wave — but the rise could drown over a million feddans of prime farmland, displace millions of people and seriously threaten Egypt’s economy.

It’s a prospect that has many worried, including civil engineer Dr. Mamdouh Hamza, whose company built the Bibliotheca Alexandria and studied the effects of sea level rise on the Delta and the nation’s ports.

“We fought to protect every centimeter of sea-line from invasion all our history. Now we have another enemy: man-made sea rise due to global warming, which has been induced by abuse of nature,” says Hamza.

Egypt is one of the countries most vulnerable to rising global temperatures, according to the most recent report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of climate experts from around the world.

Like most nations, the waters off Egypt’s coasts are rising due to melting polar ice caps and a process known as thermal expansion in which the volume of water in the oceans grows as the water warms.

But the vulnerability of the Delta is compounded by its geography. Africa sits on a tectonic plate that is crashing into its European counterpart. This collision is causing the North Coast to sink at a rate of 2–4mm per year, according to a 2004 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The IPCC report, released in 2006, predicts an average sea level rise of between 18cm and 59cm over the next century. But many experts today believe those numbers are too conservative. The rise, they believe, will be closer to 1m.

If that happens, Hamza says about 1.5 million feddans of land would be flooded. “[That] is more than three times, maybe four times, the size of all land reclamation in Toshka and equal to all of the land Egypt has reclaimed in the last 60 years.”

In addition to the dangers of flooding, the farmland in the Delta is facing another major problem: an onslaught of salt. The region is losing fresh groundwater, due in part to the proliferation of wells and the High Dam, which prevents the Nile from flooding. That freshwater is being replaced by seawater, which can have a devastating effect on farmland.

Meanwhile, the High Dam has also cut off much of the river silt that is vital to replacing the land eroded by the sea and replenishing the lush soil of the Delta.

The repercussions of these issues could be severe. The Delta region is the country’s most productive agricultural zone. While many of the reclaimed desert farms focus on exports, most Delta farmers grow staples like wheat, rice and barley for domestic consumption.

Losing so much arable land would force Egypt, already a major importer of grains, to be even more reliant on other countries for food.

The Delta is also one of the most densely populated regions in the world, home to about half of Egypt’s population, many of whom are impoverished. It isn’t clear where they would go or how they would make a living. “Their resilience is lower, meaning they are less able to withstand shocks because often their livelihoods are right on the edge,” says Dr. Guy Jobbins, a senior program officer for the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa Program at the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a government-backed Canadian research organization.

To illustrate the range of options, Jobbins gives two extreme examples of how to cope with sea level rise in the Delta. The first is to build a seawall along the coast that is strong enough to hold back the Mediterranean. The second is to retreat several kilometers, turn the land in between into salt marsh and then build a wall. “The first is very expensive for the government and the second damages private property owners,” says Jobbins.

He points to the Netherlands, most of which is below sea level. The nation spends about $100 per capita maintaining a system of dikes to keep the sea out, a price that Egypt may have difficulty paying. “Managed retreat will probably be the most cost-effective [strategy] in some areas,” says Jobbins.

For Hamza, the idea of giving up land is offensive. “Four hundred years ago, Holland protected the land. Since then they have been acquiring land from the sea and we will give up our land? No.”

In November 2007, Hamza presented his plan for saving the Delta, which involves building an embankment along the entire coastline and skirting it with a plastic diaphragm, which filters the water to prevent the intrusion of salt.

Hamza estimates his plan would cost LE 20 billion: LE 6 billion to build the embankment to prevent flooding, LE 8 billion to build the diaphragm and LE 6 billion to protect the Delta’s lakes from being flooded with seawater.

When asked where this money would come from, Hamza says that it is the United States and Europe that are most responsible for climate change. “Those people should together pay the bill for what we need to do to protect our land,” he says.

But government officials want more research on the impacts of climate change in Egypt before implementing any specific plan.

Jobbins agrees that it is important to conduct more accurate, community-specific research on which to base public policy. “The tendency is to make fairly banal assumptions about how that kind of change affects people, leading to poorly designed policies which can exacerbate problems.

“The signs are we’re already going well beyond even the 59cm [rise in sea levels] that was predicted in the [IPCC] report and that was only released a few years ago.”

Dr. Sayed Sabry, an advisor on climate change at the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, says adapting to climate change is a priority for Egypt. As proof, he points to the country’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol and international forums on climate change.

But there is currently no plan in place to deal with the problems facing the Delta.

Sabry says that before taking action to protect the region, it is necessary to create a national database for research into climate change. The database he imagines would break the problem into coastal zones, agricultural production and water management and would be accompanied by increased research efforts on climate change.

Sabry says that a government action plan — which consists mostly of participating in international forums and attempting to gain carbon credits through the Kyoto protocol — has existed for years, but has not been implemented vigorously due to a lack of interest.

Now that climate change is receiving more attention, he believes it will be easier to implement a new plan, to be drafted early next year. Sabry declined to give details about the draft and did not say whether it will include a blueprint for the Delta. But he says there is unprecedented interest in the planning process from the private sector and other government ministries.

Sabry does not doubt the IPCC report or other like it, but cautions, “there are scenarios and studies, but you cannot say that they are 100% [accurate].” Although he does not doubt the severity of the problem, Sabry says he is concerned that policy recommendations based on vague conclusions will not be effective.

Egypt is responsible for 0.67% of world carbon emissions, a small contribution relative to the size of its population. Regardless of its own carbon reduction policy, Egypt will bear the brunt of decisions made by other nations, including its strategic ally, and the world’s worst per capita polluter, the United States.

Some experts believe the country still has enough time to avert a national calamity. “The economy is going to be badly hit, the population on the North Coast is going to be badly hit,” says Jobbins. “[But] so long as we make adequate adaptations we can really reduce that impact. And we’ll have time to do it.” bt

R ising sea levels are not the only hazard facing the Delta.

Coastal areas exist in a state of equilibrium, in which fresh groundwater and salty seawater push against each other with equal pressure.

But in the Delta, this balance is being disrupted. Part of the problem is that the groundwater is being depleted by small-scale activities such as the digging of wells.

Major projects, like the High Dam, have exacerbated the problem. The annual flooding of the Nile used to refill Delta groundwater. Without this annual inflow, seawater is filtering into aquifers and leeching into the soil. When the salt content gets too high, crop fertility drops and in some cases farmers are forced to abandon their land.

The High Dam has also changed the balance between the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea.

Historically, the annual Nile floods replenished the Delta with silt from areas south of Egypt, replacing what had been washed away and enriching the soil that remained. Now most of the silt that used to flow north is settling into Lake Nasser, allowing the Mediterranean to slowly erode the Delta.

W hile progress has been made in the study of climate change, there are still questions about exactly how much sea levels will rise in the next century. After all, calculating sea rise isn’t a purely scientific exercise.

Climate change scientists must make century-long assumptions about pollution levels — the driving force behind rising temperatures — in formulating their models. And those levels are based more on policy than science.

A further source of uncertainty is the rapid breakup of ice sheets, such as in Greenland and the Antarctic. As the ice sheets melt, there is a possibility that they will suddenly collapse, with large chunks falling into the ocean. By increasing the surface area of the ice, the rate of melting will increase dramatically. Predictions of sea level rise from ice sheet break up range from 1–5m, but in fact, no one knows exactly how it will work or what effect it will have.

The end result: three years after the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an authoritative report that included figures on sea level increases, the numbers are already out of date. The IPCC predicted the world’s oceans would rise anywhere from 18cm to 59cm. The working number now is now 1m.