The Nile:

a threatened river and a river-dependent civilization

The Nile flows from south to north over 6,695km from its first tributary - the Ruvyironza River in Burundi - before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. 

The Nile Basin, which is a network of connected ecosystems, spans 11 countries: Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt. 

The river consists of two main tributaries known as the White Nile and the Blue Nile. These rivers meet at the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. 

From there, the unified river is joined by the Atbarah River before reaching Egypt in the north. The Nile is the only river that crosses through five distinct climate zones. The map shows how the river crosses from a tropical rainy climate to a semi-tropical one, then on to a semi-arid climate before the arid Sahara Desert and finally into the Mediterranean.

Slow and steady

Scientists believe the Nile to be between 20 and 30 million years old. In its current form, it is considered the oldest and longest river on the planet. It contains more than 100 islands, Egypt being home to 22 of them. The construction of dams on the Nile, including the Renaissance Dam, is expected to severely impact the biodiversity of these islands and the people who rely on them. Although the river is long, compared to other major rivers it is considered very slow. It is estimated to take up to three months for water to flow from Lake Victoria in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. 

Colonial-era treaties

In 1929, Egypt and Britain signed the Nile Waters Agreement. Britain signed as a representative of Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Sudan. The document recognised Egypt’s right to the waters of the Nile as well as the right to veto any irrigation projects that would affect its share of the river's water. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan signed another accord that supplemented the previous agreement. It gave Egypt the right to an annual share of 55.5 billion cubic metres (66%) and Sudan 18.5bn cubic metres (22%). Ethiopia was not consulted. The remaining 12 percent of the river's 84 billion cubic metre annual water supply is lost to evaporation. Britain benefitted from the agreement as it was, at the time, taking advantage of Egypt's water-intensive crops, including cotton. In 1999, 10 Nile Basin countries formed the Nile Basin Initiative, namely Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. This intergovernmental partnership aimed to develop cooperation, share socioeconomic benefits, and promote regional peace and security.

Water resource for 280 million people

The Nile Basin is shared by 280 million people across 11 countries. The basin is one of the largest in the world, covering approximately 10% of the entire African continent. Despite this, many countries in the region face a water deficit. Growing populations, economic development and climate change have placed additional strains on water resources. The infographic below highlights the number of people who live in the Nile Basin as a ratio of each country's population.

From Ethiopia to Egypt: United by the Nile, separated by the dam

In the next section we take you along the Blue Nile, beginning at its origins in Ethiopia, passing through the site of the Renaissance Dam, to where it meets the White Nile in Sudan and finally into Egypt.

Lake Tana

Lake Tana is the main reservoir of the Blue Nile, providing over 80 percent of the river’s water. It is located 1,788 metres above sea level in the northwestern Ethiopian Highlands. Lake Tana is Ethiopia's largest lake (the third-largest in the Nile Basin) and contains half the country’s fresh water resources. Seven large permanent rivers, as well as about 40 smaller seasonal rivers, feed the lake.

The Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia began construction of the Renaissance Dam in April 2011. The twin-reservoir dam is in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, just 30km from the Sudanese border. Once complete, the primary dam will span an area of 1,780sq kilometres and will store approximately 15 billion cubic metres of water behind its 155 metre-high wall. The second auxiliary dam is a rock and concrete reservoir, measuring 4,800 metres in length and 55 metres in height. It will store approximately 60 billion cubic metres of water and will help divert any excess water from the primary reservoir back along the course of the Nile. The dam has a combined capacity of almost 75 billion cubic metres.

Egypt's Aswan High Dam has more than twice the volumetric capacity of the Renaissance Dam. 
Once complete, the Renaissance Dam will be the second-largest dam in Africa by volume. However, in terms of electricity produced, the Renaissance Dam's 6,450MW rating will easily eclipse the Aswan High Dam's 2,100MW rating, making it the largest hydroelectric power plant on the African continent and among the top 10 in the world. On November 13, 2019, Ethiopia announced that it had completed construction of the auxiliary dam. The main dam is expected to be completed in early 2023 but will begin filling in the summer of 2020. Here is how Ethiopia's Renaissance Dam stacks up against Egypt's Aswan High Dam, as well as a breakdown of how much electricity it is expected to produce.

What Ethiopia wants

The East African country is counting on the Renaissance Dam to meet its growing energy and development needs. The Ethiopian government is planning to build a new commercial network in surrounding areas, which it says will lead to employment opportunities. Once the dam is complete, Ethiopia will become Africa's largest energy exporter, and sell about 2,000MW of surplus electricity from the dam to neighbouring countries. Addis Ababa refuses to acknowledge colonial-era Nile Water Agreements and wants the dam to be filled in three to five years. It believes the 40 billion cubic metres of dam water that Egypt says it needs annually will hinder its ability to fill the dam in time to produce much-needed electricity. Ethiopia is one of the cleanest energy producers on the African continent. 

The triangle capital

The White Nile and the Blue Nile join one another forming a triangle around Sudan's capital city Khartoum. From there, the unified river will flow another 2,500 km before reaching the Mediterranean Sea.

What Sudan wants

Khartoum, like Cairo, is concerned about its share of the Nile's water. Experts believe that the construction of the dam could bring some benefits to the country, most notably regulating the flow of the Nile throughout the year, which could increase agricultural output and prevent devastating flooding. The dam will also block large amounts of silt and tree trunks that obstruct the turbines of Sudan's own hydroelectric dams in the east of the country. However, experts have warned that this reduction of silt will impoverish Sudan's fertile land, making it more difficult for the country to achieve food security.

Egyptian Civilization

For more than 5,000 years, civilisations have thrived along the banks of the Nile. Ancient Egyptians revered the mighty river, calling it a “gift of the gods”. Historians attribute Egypt's social, cultural and political foundations to the river. Today, the Nile still provides 98% of Egypt’s water needs, with about 95% of Egyptians living on its banks.

The High Dam, an expensive solution

Inaugurated in 1971, Egypt’s Aswan Dam is Africa's largest by volume. It produces 2,100MW of hydroelectric power, which accounts for less than 5% of Egypt's total energy production. Scientists have warned that the dam has had a negative environmental and biological impact on the northern part of Egypt’s Delta, including erosion of the coast. Prior to the construction of the dam, the Nile in Egypt contained more than 72 species of widely present fish. Today, less than 25 species remain

What Egypt wants

Egypt wants to ensure that its 55.5 billion cubic-metre share of the Nile is not reduced. Egypt wants Ethiopia to fill the dam over the course of 10 to 21 years and only during the rainy season. Cairo has also demanded that Addis Ababa double the number of water release points in the dam to ensure adequate water flow when water levels are low.

Can Egypt avoid a water crisis?

While there are a handful of solutions available to Egypt, most of them will mean substantial costs to Egypt’s energy, water and food production.  

More dams on the Nile

Over the past 50 years, six Nile Basin countries have built 25 hydroelectric dams. As of 2019, four dams were under construction with four more being studied. The Nile is not just a source of water. It is an exceedingly sensitive ecosystem that plays a role in the environmental and ecological balance of east Africa. The Nile is home to more than 800 species of fish. The diversity of fish stocks is linked to the diversity of birds, insects and microorganisms. The absence of any of these elements will undermine the entire ecosystem. Any disruption to the quality and volume of the water flowing through the river has an impact on the people and wildlife who depend upon it and could trigger a wide-scale extinction.

There are several alternative sources of energy - but there is only one Nile.

Reproduced from:
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/saving-the-nile/index.html

A serious water crisis between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan

The Nile river: geopolitical problems

British tourism pioneer Thomas Cook all but invented the Nile cruise in the 1870s when he cornered the market on steamer crossings and proceeded to set up hotels in Luxor and Aswan. One hundred and fifty years later, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made the global fascination with the mystic river a cornerstone of his campaign to fix Egypt’s economy.

Now he just needs the Nile to cooperate.

In recent years, dropping water levels have repeatedly stranded cruises sailing to Upper Egypt’s archaeological treasures, infuriating tourists and devastating boat owners’ bottom lines. Water scarcity has replaced terrorism as the greatest risk to tour operators’ livelihoods.

“The main threat to the tourism season now is the disruption of navigation in the Nile due to shallow water,” said Ahmed Abdel Ghani, a cruise ship owner whose boat has been docked for the second year in a row.

Water levels hit their nadir during the winter months, at the height of tourism season. Many visitors visit Luxor and Aswan and the archaeological sites along the river’s banks by booking cruises in December and January, Abdel Ghani said, most notably during New Year’s celebrations.

But dropping water levels have made many of those sites inaccessible by boat.

“Sometimes a cruise ship will remain stranded in the river for more than three days before the arrival of rescue units to provide tourists with other means of transportation,” Abdel Ghani noted. “For the tourists, a sudden change of program … is disappointing and frustrating. Nile cruises will bear the brunt of such incidents in the coming tourist seasons.”

All too often, visitors end up missing a large part of their tour program since they are unable to access cities such as Kom Ombo and Arment, which cruise ships now have trouble reaching. As a result, the Nile tours become limited to trips to major archaeological sites such as Luxor and Aswan. Disappointed tourists who had to cut short their tours are unlikely to recommend a Nile cruise to their friends.

Cruise line operators such as Ghani incur multiple losses every time navigation is disrupted. They have to secure alternative land transportation for the disgruntled tourists, and running aground risks major damage to a ship’s hull and engine, with huge maintenance and repair costs.

Abdel Ghani estimates the daily loss for cruise ship owners from a disrupted trip at around $5,000. That’s a big hit for a boat carrying about 100 tourists paying an average of $80 per night for a weeklong or 10-day cruise.

Even hard-fought improvements in the country’s safety reputation risk backfiring.

Egypt launched an ad campaign targeting new markets during last year’s soccer World Cup and recently resumed flights with Russia grounded after a deadly Islamic State bombing in 2015. Across Upper Egypt, Abdel Ghani said, tourism sector workers had been looking forward to the recovery. But now they have their doubts.

“Ahead of this year’s tourist season, intensive preparations started on about 90 cruise ships for the New Year's celebrations, and many tourism programs were launched. A high demand was registered for these tours by international tourism partners and agents. Unfortunately, once again, low water levels hindered navigation and most of these tours risked suspension,” Abdel Ghani said. “The specter of water shortage may cause us more losses than before.”

Cruise ship owners aren’t the only ones who rely on the Nile to deliver a steady stream of tourists. Aswan and Luxor also rely on a busy winter season to sustain hotels, restaurants and local markets that sell souvenirs and traditional products.

The tourism sector water needs represent another challenge for the Egyptian government, which plans to attract 20 million tourists a year by 2020. More tourist facilities means more water consumption in the form of golf courses, swimming pools and industrial lakes in tourist-friendly cities.

The situation has attracted the government’s attention. After some 40 cruises between Luxor and Aswan were affected by navigational restrictions during the 2017-18 winter season, Sisi called a meeting of his tourism and water resources ministers. He pledged to develop an “integrated plan to secure Nile River navigation” including “a routine purge of the river bed by dredges, placing guiding signs and restrictions on cruise owners in order to guarantee the highest possible safety for passengers.”

Ironically, the government’s own policies that prioritize agriculture and drinking water over other uses are part of the problem.

Currently, Egypt’s National Water Resources Management Plan proscribes the release of exceptional quantities of water from Lake Nasser for river navigation. Instead, the minimum daily water release set at 75 million cubic meters (almost 20 billion gallons) is distributed to potable water stations throughout the country, with part of it allocated to agricultural lands.

Ever since the Aswan High Dam went into operation in the 1970s, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation has followed an annual practice known as the “winter closure,” for 40 days between December and February. During this period when irrigation needs are at their lowest, water is trapped in Lake Nasser and canals are emptied out for maintenance and development. As a result, water levels in the Nile and its branches decrease significantly, causing some usually submerged islands to break the surface.

The policy aims to conserve water for the summer months amid the shortage crisis. But it has created its own set of disruptions, stranding boats, exacerbating water pollution and killing fish.

Los países fronterizos 

Hundreds of miles south of Aswan close to the Blue Nile’s source in northwest Ethiopia, farmer Issa, a farmer in his 20s, is much more upbeat about the river’s future.

Residents of his village of timber and palm-leaf huts have always relied on untreated rainwater and mountain runoff for drinking and bathing water. But construction of Africa's biggest hydroelectric power plant near the border with Sudan has sparked dreams of clean water and reliable energy. Once complete, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, will flood some 650 square miles of forest, an area about four times the size of Cairo. Ethiopia estimates the dam will generate 6,500 megawatts of electricity and help the country of 110 million people reach middle-income status.

Al-Monitor toured the villages of Bisha, Guba, Teba and Sherkole in the Benishangul-Gumuz region where the dam is located in July 2016. Issa, a farmer whose land was expropriated for the dam project, said he’d heard about job opportunities for local workers and was excited about the prospect of helping build a better future for himself and his community.

A world away in the corridors of power in Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Cairo, diplomats and regional leaders are dealing with a whole different set of concerns as they try to strike a deal on water rights affecting tens of millions of people. Ethiopia's dam aspirations date back to a 1964 feasibility study conducted by the US Bureau of Reclamation, which first identified potential sites. Construction finally began in 2011. Once complete, it will take anywhere from five to 15 years to fill the reservoir of 70 billion cubic meters (18.5 trillion gallons), which is equivalent to the entire annual flow of the Blue Nile at the Sudan border.

The talks are a matter of national security for Egypt, where the vast majority of people live along the banks of the river. Under a 1959 water sharing agreement with Sudan, Egypt is allotted 55.5 billion cubic meters (14.7 trillons gallons) of water annually from the Blue Nile, which accounts for 85% of Egypt's Nile water. (The smaller White Nile tributary joins the Blue Nile in Khartoum.) At the time, Egypt’s population did not exceed 20 million people. Now, that same amount is supposed to meet the water needs of 100 million Egyptians.

Northeastern Africa has been down this path before. During the reign of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, Egypt turned to the Soviet Union to help build the High Dam at Aswan to better control flooding. Furious at being left out of regional negotiations over water quotas, impoverished Ethiopia began eyeing its own dams. Tensions thawed in the early 1990s, leading to a 1993 framework providing that “each party shall refrain from engaging in any activity related to the Nile waters that may cause appreciable harm to the interests of the other party.”

However, the attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak by Egyptian Islamists while he was visiting Addis Ababa in 1995 reignited tensions. In 2001, Addis Ababa announced its intention to establish several development projects on the river as part of its national water strategy. Ethiopia also mobilized upstream countries to fight the quota system, signing a pact with five other African nations in 2010 that allows them to conduct projects along the river without Egypt's prior consent. Plans for the GERD itself were confirmed in April 2011.

Over the past eight years, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia have held numerous technical, political and security meetings to try to reach a deal that would minimize the dam's impact on the downstream nations' water security. Despite the creation of a trilateral committee in 2012, however, tensions remain high, fueling political instability back in Egypt that has only made it harder to reach a compromise.

The dam was one of the issues that fueled popular anger at Mohammed Morsi during his short stint as Egypt's first democratically elected president. Morsi was hammered in the media after Ethiopia began diverting the flow of Blue Nileto make way for the dam in May 2013. When Sisi was elected president in May 2014, he immediately set about trying to calm the public while also working to improve relations with Ethiopia in an ultimately successful bid to rejoin the African Union (AU), which had suspended Egypt in July 2013 following Morsi's ouster (the AU is based in Addis Ababa).

Under Sisi, Egypt has stressed a diplomatic outcome to the crisis. In 2015, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed a Declaration of Principles on the GERD, despite the advice of legal experts who argued against joining a document that allowed Ethiopia to strengthen its legal and international position while not explicitly providing for the respect and protection of Egypt's annual Nile water quota. “Ethiopia accomplished its mission when it signed a declaration of principles that gave it sovereignty [over its land and natural resources],” Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom told the Ethiopian parliament following a round of negotiations between Addis Ababa and Cairo in 2015. “Egypt,” he added, “did not mention its historical rights of the Nile waters in this declaration.”

Since then, Egyptian frustration with Ethiopia has swelled. Four years since the declaration was signed, none of its 10 clauses — including a requirement to conduct comprehensive technical studies to test the dam's impacts on Egypt and Sudan — have been carried out. Ethiopia even rejected Egypt's demand to delay filling the dam reservoir until the end of the negotiations. The situation remains unchanged even as Egypt's political and security apparatus has taken over from the technical experts, leading to the intervention of the heads of the general intelligence services as a main party in official negotiations for the first time in April 2018.

Back in the Nile Delta, Faqi describes the water shortage as an “epidemic” that is slowly killing Egypt’s millennia-old agricultural tradition. “Our children have left the land and most farmers have sold their property to look for other sources of income,” he said. “If the water shortage continues, there won’t be any agricultural lands left.”

Ayah Aman

Reference:

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/05/dry-nile-river-egypt.html?utm_campaign=20190523&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Daily%20Newsletter