Climate Change, Booming Population, and the Shrinking Delta (3)

Hello again! Last week, I wrote on the links between hydropolitics and colonial legacies in the Nile River Basin. This week, in light of COP26, we will be focusing on climate change and human-drive ecological instability, particularly its impact on the Nile River delta; it is essential to note at this juncture that climate change is spurred by carbon emissions that are disproportionately emitted by Western states, while its impacts are felt most harshly in developing states (for instance, global warming projections in Africa are 1.5 times higher than the global mean, see Christensen et al., 2007). Further, high rates of absolute poverty in the Nile River Basin as well as technical challenges and political instability mean that people are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. However, climate change in isolation is not the only factor spurring water insecurity in the region. Rapid urban growth is spurring rising demand for food, energy, and (crucially, for this blog) water in ways that will certainly be impacted by climate change, but of which climate change is not solely responsible for (Carter & Parker, 2009). 

A point I want to make clear in this post is that while the case of the disappearing Nile delta does not solely stem from a changing climate, each of the sources of the delta's shrinking come from a a global economy (neoliberal world order) which values short-term profit over long-term ecological health.

The majority of climate models projecting the future of the Nile River Basin agree that hot and dry years will become increasingly common over the next few decades (Coffel et al, 2019). Such a shift would mean that crop yields would certainly take a hit, and not just from drought and heat, but also climate-adjacent impacts such as agricultural pests and vector-borne diseases just as many states in the Basin are trying to increase their agricultural capacity. This change would occur at a time when Coffel et al (2019) predicts that the population of the upper Nile River Basin will double by 2040, from its current population of 200 million to 400 million people. As Carter & Parker argue (2009), climate change impacts are likely to be significant, however, it is difficult to project such impacts with large certainty or specificity. It is possible, however, to model population growth and demographic change with much more certainty, and conclude that the impact of rapid urbanization is likely to be much larger of a stress on water resources than climate change within the next few decades. 

More difficult-to-predict climate-driven impacts are the affect of a warmer, drier climate on migration, political stability, and conflict. In tandem with industrialization and new agricultural techniques, there is a large degree of uncertainty regarding the extent to which climate change will affect the Basin on a state by state level. With the intention of being specific when discussing a trend with a large degree of uncertainty, we will focus in specifically on the climate-driven factors affecting the Nile River delta and see if we can try and model out the future of this crucial region.

The Nile River Delta

Aswan Dam in Egypt (Source: NASA)

The Nile River delta provides an interesting case study in the myriad impacts of climate change (and beyond that, anthropogenic alteration of the environment) because the shrinking delta does not merely stem from one factor such as rising sea level. The Nile River delta comprises just 2% of Egypt's land area but is home to 41% of its population, a staggering 95 million people. The delta is on average a mere ~1m above sea level and is going under; if sea level rise continues, along with other factors, the delta and its invaluable farmland will lose nearly 3,000 square kilometers by 2100 (Stanley & Clemente, 2017). While rising sea level is certainly contributing to the shrinking delta, groundwater pumping which lowers the land is moving at an even faster rate. A further culprit is the Aswan Dam (pictured above), completed in 1968, which has reduced the amount of sediment reaching the delta by over 98%. The fertile mud of the delta derives from sources upstream, now blocked by the dam. Beneath the delta, Egypt has vastly increased its capacity to drill for natural gas, extracting fuel from thick layers of sand and shale beneath the delta leading to further sinking.

As stated in the introduction, the point I am attempting to make here is that the same factors driving the warming climate are also sinking the delta in other ways. In the case of the dam, we can see an attempt to fundamentally alter the discharge of the Nile without respect for the underlying ecological order of the hydrological system—of which sediment recharge is a crucial element. In the case of natural gas drilling, an economy that produces nature as commodities for exchange in the never-ending pursuit of profit is unsustainably altering the ground level with no foresight for future consequences. In each of these instances, we can see clear examples of how the incentives in the global economy are poorly suited for the future. 

Soon it will be time to reap the consequences of such behavior.