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WATER POLITICS

Via The Guardian, a look at Egypt’s climate future which seems to be characterized by rising temperatures, coastal erosion, storms and water scarcity:

“…Just a few miles north of where I am now standing, the Mediterranean Sea is remorselessly battering the Egyptian coastline. Salt is leaching into the rich soils and invading the drinking water wells, 1,000-year-old homes are being eroded from below and hundreds of square miles of land have been inundated by rising water in just a few generations. Sea levels are inexorably rising and storms are becoming more intense.

As 195 parties and 17,000 delegates prepare to head for next week’s UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, the temptation is to label these phenomena “climate change”. It’s not. Or at least it is, but only in part. In fact, the ecological turmoil taking place on the delta is mostly a natural coastal process that has happened throughout recorded history.

But now, scientists say, there’s a perfect storm brewing and climate change will inevitably have a major role in the future story of Egypt.

I talked to Guy Jobbins, a Cairo-based British water scientist who heads Canada’s International Development Research Centre climate change adaptation programme for Africa. He is both alarming and cautious. It’s quite possible that Egypt’s second city, Alexandria, will become an island connected to the rest of Egypt by a bridge, he says. But he also believes that the country – one of the richest in Africa – will be able to adapt if it spends billions of dollars.

Climate change is happening “without a doubt”, he says, but disentangling its impacts from everything else happening in Egypt is nigh on impossible. Not only is north Africa steadily sinking – or subducting – into the Mediterranean, he says, but also the great Nile water is barely getting to the coast in places because so much is taken off by farmers or evaporating before it reaches the sea. In addition, storms and sea surges are worsening and world record-scale temperatures are being recorded.

Jobbins says:

“Is climate change happening? Yes. Is it serious? Yes. We know sea level rise is happening but it’s very slow and steady, millimetres over a decade. But the effect it is being aggravated by the increasing intensity of storms. Last year saw the worst [storms] in decades. The last few years have seen temperature spikes, with nights becoming unbearably hot and then switching to freezing cold. But the real issues are groundwater and soil salination.”

Jobbins is just one voice in the fierce debate about the impact of climate change in Egypt. Some scientists have claimed that the predicted one-metre rise in sea levels over the next 90 years will completely inundate the Nile delta, leaving it little more than wide open expanses of sea and devastating the economy.

At worst, says Mohamed El-Raey, professor of environmental physics at the University of Alexandria, 1.5 million people could be displaced in Alexandria alone. Further areas will become impossible to cultivate and extreme heat will make cities unbearably hot. According to the IPCC report to be published today in Kampala, Uganda, climate change is linked to extreme weather, and Africa will be badly affected.

The trouble, says Jobbins, is that Africa has very few climate models, little research has been done on the continent and what exists is ambiguous.

“The [models] range from suggesting Egypt will have 30% more water, because of hotter weather, to 70% less, because of evaporation. The government is very uncertain but is deeply concerned about irrigation works taking place in Sudan and Ethiopia.”

What is certain is that climate change will hit the most vulnerable people first and hardest throughout Africa. “It’s always the poor who are hurt the most because they are less able to absorb the shocks and adapt because they have fewer assets,” Jobbins says.

The government, which has a revolution to handle, is widely thought to be burying its head in the sand.

The best that could happen, suggests one source in the ministry of water, is that Egypt strikes lucky and taps into what is believed to be a vast underground water oasis spanning parts of Chad, Egypt, Libya and Sudan.

Last week, the government said it was launching work on a series of experimental wells in the desert. “The prize is vast but we should not count on it,” a spokesman in the water ministry said.