Water resources management in Egypt
The history of modern water management in Egypt begins with the construction of the Old Aswan Dam in 1902 and barrages on the Nile in the 19th and early 20th century.
The water regime of the river was changed fundamentally in 1970 when the Aswan High Dam was completed, eliminating the annual Nile flood.
The dam brought major benefits such as increased water availability for Egyptian agriculture leading to higher income and employment, hydropower production, flood control, improved navigation, and the creation of fisheries in Lake Nasser.
Unrelated to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, water quality deteriorated through drainage return flows and discharges of untreated municipal and industrial wastewater.
Downstream of the Aswan Dam, there are seven barrages to increase the river's water level so that it can flow into first-level irrigation canals.
Water also flows from the Nile to the Faiyum Oasis through a canal called Bahr Yussef that dates back to Pharaonic times.
Its implementation began, again with support from USAID, in eleven pilot areas, beginning with the Serri Canal with 120,000 feddan (50,400 hectares) in Minya Governorate.
However, net revenues increased only by 6–9% due to reduced pumping costs compared to a target of 30%, so that the project was rated as "marginally satisfactory" by the World Bank in 2007.
The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System which contains 150,000 billion m³ of freshwater, equivalent to almost 3,000 times the annual flow of the Nile, is non-renewable.
Developments in Sudan, Ethiopia or other riparian countries could reduce water availability to Egypt, for example through increased abstractions for irrigation.
[22] According to studies quoted by the IPCC, climate change could lead to the loss of a "sizable proportion of the northern part of the Nile delta" to "a combination of inundation and erosion".
[27] According to Omran Frihy, a retired coastal researcher, authorities are spending US$300 million to build concrete sea walls to protect the beaches of Alexandria.
[28] According to a report in The Guardian, some senior Egyptian environmental officials do not believe climate change is real or are convinced the problem is so great that human intervention is useless.
All drainage water in Upper Egypt, south of Cairo, flows back into the Nile and the irrigation canals; this amount is estimated at 4 km3/yr.
Last but not least the Nile River also has ecological functions that require minimum flows to be maintained, especially for the brackish lakes in the Delta (see below under biodiversity).
According to reports by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, in 2007 average organic loads in 11 governorates along the Nile remained below the allowed limit of 6 mg/liter of biological oxygen demand (BOD).
[31] However, more salts are being discharged into the Mediterranean Sea than are entering at Aswan (see Irrigation for agriculture in Egypt) so that in the long run the salinity of the water at the Delta barrages could decrease.
However, saline groundwater of marine origin enters the Delta through pumping of brackish water and upwelling in lakes and drains, thus counterbalancing this effect.
Several hundred thousand water birds winter in these lakes, including the world's largest concentrations of little gulls and whiskered terns.
Lake Manzala, which used to be a significant source of inexpensive fish for human consumption in Egypt, has been affected by pollution and reduced water inflow.
The project was unprofitable: crops did not grow well in the salty soil and the value of resulting produce was less than the market value of the fish that the reclaimed land had formerly yielded.
To improve the quality of monitoring and reporting, Egypt has received support from the Canadian Association for Environmental Analytical Laboratories.
[1] The following authorities operate under MWRI:[42] The concept of formal long-term national water resources planning was introduced in Egypt through foreign technical assistance during the 1970s.
These include a drought in 1979–88; cessation in 1983 of construction works on the Jonglei Canal in Sudan; and a revitalization of a land reclamation program, requiring one billion m3 of additional water each year.
[3] In June 2005 the Ministry presented an Integrated Water Resources Management Plan, which was prepared with technical assistance from the World Bank, as a "transitional strategy including further reform interventions" building on the NWRP.
[16] The Plan, which reads more like a World Bank report than a report by the Egyptian government, includes 39 actions in the fields of institutional reform and strengthening, policies and legislation, physical interventions, capacity building, technological and information systems, water quality, economic and financial framework, research, raising awareness, monitoring and evaluation and transboundary cooperation.
External cooperation has played an important role in shaping Egypt's modern water resources management through both investment financing and technical assistance.
After Egypt opened itself to the West in the 1970s, the United States, various European countries and the World Bank provided major investment financing for water supply and sanitation and for irrigation and drainage.
Concerning technical assistance, the Netherlands, the World Bank and UNDP played important roles in supporting successive national water master plans since the 1980s.
With support by USAID a layer of management – the Inspectorate level – was stripped from the MWRI administrative system, different chains of command were brought together in the form of Integrated Water Management Districts (IWMDs), and Branch Canal Water User Associations were established across around 40% of the irrigated area of Egypt.
