For the pharaohs, it was life. Currently, the Nile guarantees the survival of millions of Africans. But with climate change, combined with human exploration, the countdown to the world’s second longest river has begun.
In the delta where the Nile meets the sea, the Egyptian Sayed Mohamed can see his lands disappear. Originally from Uganda, Christine Nalwadda Kalema fears losing the electricity that lights her home. In Sudan, Mohamed Joma is worried about his crops.
“The Nile is the most valuable thing we have, we must not allow it to change”, laments this 17-year-old farmer, the last generation of a farming family in the town of Alty, in the state of Al-Jazeera, in central Sudan.
The image of the 6,500 km long river, celebrated as a god in the Pharaonic period with its feluccas, papyri and myths, is no longer idyllic.
Your transformation is underway. In 50 years, its flow went from 3,000 m³ per second to 2,830 m³, that is, almost 100 times less than the Amazon.
With the forecast of reduced rains and with episodes of drought that have become increasingly recurrent in East Africa, the flow could be reduced by 70%, according to the worst UN forecasts.
In the delta, the Mediterranean has taken up between 35 and 75 meters of land every year since the 1960s. If the sea rises one meter, it will swallow up 34% of this region of northern Egypt and nine million people will be forced to move.
It is the third most vulnerable place on the planet to climate change.
Lake Victoria, the main supplier of water to the Nile, is threatened by lack of rain, evaporation and slow changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. One day it may even disappear.
Some predictions encourage the appetite of many, and attempts to stem the river’s flow by building dams that hasten an announced catastrophe.
From the sea to its source, from Egypt to Uganda, several AFP teams are looking for explanations for the decline of a river that covers 10% of Africa’s surface and is an essential resource for some 500 million people.
– Submerged or contaminated –
On the coast of the delta, between 1968 and 2009 the sea swallowed up 3 km of land.
Seen from the sky, with satellite images, the Damietta and Rosetta canals, in the sea, disappeared. On land, the waves violently hit the plantations, which literally sink. The concrete walls erected to protect them are already half covered by sand and water.
The flow of the Nile has weakened and is no longer able to repel the Mediterranean, whose level increases with climate change (about 15 cm in the 20th century).
The mud, which for millennia consolidated the land and acted as a natural barrier, no longer reaches the sea.
These sediments of soil and organic waste, often washed away and deposited in river beds, have been blocked in southern Egypt since the Aswan dam was built to control floods in the 1960s.
Before, “there was a natural balance”, Ahmed Abdelqader, head of the authority in charge of coastal protection, told AFP. “With each flood, the Nile deposited silt sediments, which re-floated into the Damietta and Rosetta channels. But the dam upset that balance,” he detailed.
If temperatures continue to rise, the Mediterranean will advance 100 meters above the delta each year, according to the UN Environment Agency (UNEP).
15 km from the coast, the large farming village of Kafr Dawar – with its red-brick houses – is still preserved, but only on the surface.
Sayed Mohammed, 73, with 14 children and grandchildren in his care, grows corn and rice there, in fields irrigated by stone canals located between the Nile and a highway where car horns blare.
But Mediterranean salt contaminated many hectares, weakening or killing their crops. Farmers insist the vegetables are not of the same quality.
To compensate for the effects of soil salinization, more fresh water is needed in the fields and more water pumped from the Nile.
Since the 1980s, Mohamed used pumps that consumed a lot of “diesel and electricity, which were very expensive”. These are impossible expenses for the people of Kafr Dawar to assume, suffocated by inflation and devaluations.
In some parts of the Nile Delta, fields and crops were abandoned.
In recent years, this elderly person has benefited from an irrigation program based on solar energy that aims to increase the amount of fresh water and, above all, generate income among the population and thus prevent rural exodus.
Thanks to more than 400 panels funded by the local office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), he is assured that every day his half hectare of cultivation will have the water it needs.
With solar energy, “farmers save 50%”, tells AFP Amr Al Daqaq, the provincial head of irrigation. In addition, they sell the electricity produced on their land to the national company.
Still, none of Sayed Mohamed’s descendants plan to go down the agricultural path.
In the long term, the Mediterranean could engulf 100,000 hectares of farmland in the delta, located less than ten meters above sea level, according to UNEP.
A real catastrophe for northern Egypt, responsible for between 30% and 40% of national agricultural production.
– Frequent cuts –
In Egypt, 97% of the 104 million inhabitants live on the banks of the river, occupying less than 8% of the territory. In Sudan, half of the 45 million inhabitants live in 15% of the country’s territory, close to the Nile, which guarantees 67% of the country’s water resources.
By 2050, the population of these two countries will have doubled. Its temperatures will be between two and three degrees higher than today and the Nile, in turn, will also have changed.
Projections from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict that, with global warming, by 2100 evaporation will reduce river flow by 70%. The amount of water available per inhabitant will be 75% less than it is today.
And the heavy rains and floods that are forecast to hit East Africa in the future will only offset between 15% and 25% of those losses, according to these experts.
However, in the 10 countries it passes through, the Nile guarantees the survival of crops and provides energy for populations that are at the mercy of rain and, above all, its flow.
Sudan, for example, gets more than half of its electricity from hydropower. In Uganda, that number is as high as 80%.
It is thanks to the Nile that, since 2016, Christine Nalwadda Kalema, a 42-year-old single mother, has managed to light up her grocery store and her home, located in a poor neighborhood in the village of Namiyagi, near Lake Victoria, in eastern Uganda.
But that electricity, which has radically changed his life and that of his four children, may not last forever, says Revocatus Twinomuhangi, coordinator of the climate change center at Makererere University.
“If the rains are scarce, the level of Lake Victoria, and therefore of the Nile, will fall. This will reduce hydroelectric production”, he warns.
According to the expert, “in these five or ten years, we have seen droughts that are closer in time and more intense, as well as heavy rains, floods and increasingly higher temperatures”.
According to a 2020 study by six researchers from American and British universities – based on historical and geological data from the last 100,000 years – Lake Victoria could disappear in 500 years.
But for Kalema, who grows bananas, coffee and cassava in her garden to feed her family, all this data about climate change seems abstract.
What she confirms every day is that water cuts are more and more frequent.
“Because of the blackouts, my son can barely do his homework. He has to finish everything before dark, or study by candlelight”, she says, wrapped in her clothes made of patterned fabrics, very popular among the Baganda and Basoga tribes.
“It costs me a lot of money, considering I’m the only one who meets my family’s needs,” she continues.
– Capture stream –
Life without electricity remains the daily life of half of Ethiopia’s 110 million people, despite being the fastest growing country in Africa.
Addis Ababa relies on its mega-dam to remedy this situation, even if it has to fight with its neighbors.
The Great Renaissance Dam (Gerd), whose construction was launched in 2011 on the Blue Nile – which joins the White Nile in Sudan to form the Nile – has the long-term objective of installing 13 turbines for a production of 5,000 MW.
Since August, its reservoir contains 22 billion m³ of water out of 74 billion of its total capacity.
Addis Ababa already has the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa. “The Nile is a gift that God has given us Ethiopians to use,” emphasizes Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
But for Cairo, it is a source of tension that questions a 1959 agreement with Khartoum, but without Ethiopia, which grants 66% of the Nile’s annual flow to Egypt and 22% to Sudan.
To protect this achievement, in 2013, advisers to the then Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, proposed on television the destruction of the Ethiopian dam.
Today, Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi’s Egypt continues to fear a drastic reduction in the flow of the Nile in case of too rapid filling of the Gerd.
But the subject provokes debates in the scientific community itself. Some researchers are accused of exaggerating Egypt’s water losses to justify a forced intervention in Ethiopia, while others are accused of minimizing them and “betraying” their country.
In their crops, Egyptian farmers already see the effects of the great Aswan dam on the sludge that, like the dams built in Ethiopia, Uganda or Sudan, retains this valuable natural fertilizer.
– Sludge –
In the green fields of Al-Jazeera, where he grows cucumbers, eggplants and potatoes thanks to the canals that start in the Nile, Omar Abdelhay finds that the work becomes increasingly difficult with the passage of time.
Eight years ago, when this Sudanese family man – whose small mud house directly overlooks the river – started cultivating the family’s land, “there was good silt and the Nile fed our crops adequately”.
But little by little, with the dams that keep growing upstream, “the water has cleared and there is no more silt,” says the 35-year-old farmer.
Immersed in political and economic stagnation, shaken by decades of coups or hostile demonstrations against military power, Sudan struggles to manage its water resources.
Every year it rains a lot, but the rain is not necessarily beneficial to crops due to the lack of an agricultural system and rainwater storage and recycling.
Today, hunger threatens a third of the population. The country, however, has been a major player in the world markets for cotton, peanuts and gum arabic.
Thanks to the small irrigation canals dug in colonial times, a small flow was enough for water to enter and feed their fertile lands.
The system, which was supposed to be developed with Al-Jazeera’s grand irrigation plan, never came to fruition.
The fields cultivated under the direction of the state led by dictator Omar Al-Bashir – overthrown in 2019 – are abandoned. Instead, families grow cucumbers or peppers on their small plots.
Like Sudan, the countries bordering the Nile – Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda – are at the bottom of the ND-GAIN climate change vulnerability ranking. .
For Callist Tindimugaya, from Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment, “the impact of global warming will be enormous”.
“If we have scanty but heavy rains, we will experience floods. But if we face long periods without rain, we will have less water resources. And without water, you cannot survive,” she summarizes.
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