Concrete wave barriers protect the shore in Alexandria, Egypt, near the 15th-century citadel of Qaitbay. The barriers, erected in 2018, are a defence against erosion by rising Mediterranean waters.Photography by Aly Hazzaa/The Globe and Mail
The view from the terrace of the Greek-style White & Blue restaurant, perched on the outer reach of Alexandria harbour near the 15th-century Citadel of Qaitbay, was spectacular in late November. It took in a vast bay filled with yachts and fishing boats that glimmered in the soft autumn sun alongside the Corniche – the city’s buzzy waterfront promenade.
The view from the other side of the restaurant, facing the open Mediterranean, was disturbing, alarming even. The beach was covered with concrete blocks roughly triangular in shape; each had four stout legs and were akin to enormous “hedgehog” anti-tank barriers. They were hideous, numbering in the thousands, and had not only encroached upon the Citadel, one of Alexandria’s top tourist sites, but had obliterated most of the waterfront for kilometres in each direction along the Nile Delta coast. Some were covered in graffiti.
“We are looking at mountains of cement,” said Ashraf Sabry, a diving-medicine doctor who has explored the waters off Alexandria for decades. “There is no more sea for us to see.”
The blocks, which first appeared in 2018, were installed to protect Egypt’s second city – founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC – from erosion as climate change raises sea levels and sinks the northern stretches of the Nile Delta. They were designed to break the power of the waves that can hit a coast with formidable force.
Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resource and Irrigation says that sea levels are rising faster than ever.
Until the early 1990s, the increase was 1.8 millimetres a year. In the past decade, it has been 3.2 millimetres a year. At the same time, the land on which Alexandria sits is sinking at about the same rate; street flooding during heavy rain has become routine.
Grim outlook for Alexandria
Sea level rise projections by 2100 for two scenarios
Mild–1 metre
Mediterranean Sea
Extreme–3 metres
Citadel of
Qaitbay
Abu Qir
Bay
Alexandria
Harbour
Detail
ISR.
JOR.
EGYPT
Alexandria
0
15
KM
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;
heritage science journal; earth.org
Grim outlook for Alexandria
Sea level rise projections by 2100 for two scenarios
Mild–1 metre
Mediterranean Sea
Extreme–3 metres
Citadel of
Qaitbay
Abu Qir
Bay
Alexandria
Harbour
Detail
ISR.
JOR.
EGYPT
Alexandria
0
15
KM
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;
heritage science journal; earth.org
Grim outlook for Alexandria
Sea level rise projections by 2100 for two scenarios
Mild–1 metre
Mediterranean Sea
Extreme–3 metres
Citadel of
Qaitbay
Abu Qir
Bay
Alexandria
Harbour
Detail
ISR.
JOR.
EGYPT
Alexandria
0
15
KM
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;heritage
science journal; earth.org
This slow-motion environmental horror show is a double-headed menace: It threatens to drown Alexandria – parts of the city are already below sea level – and to turn vast amounts of farmland in the Nile Delta, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the Mediterranean since antiquity, poisonous with salinity. As the problem increases, Egypt faces a long-term food crisis.
“Between land degradation and salinity, the agriculture yields are falling,” Salah Hafez, 79, who was chief executive of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency from 1991 to 1997, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “And Alexandria is sinking. It’s a very big problem. You cannot lift an entire city.”
Climate change is hitting Egypt, the host of November’s COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, particularly hard.
Overdevelopment – dams, highways, factories, intensive farming, urban sprawl – in the finely balanced ecosystems along the River Nile and in the Nile Delta is speeding up the overall degradation, some of which, like the battered shoreline, is plainly visible.
In Abu Qir, northwest of central Alexandria, the beach along these buildings is almost gone. The land around Alexandria has sunk by about 3.2 millimetres annually in the past decade.
Ashraf Sabry, an expert in diving medicine, is worried about how rising temperatures are changing local marine life.
Mr. Sabry, 65, began his career in diving medicine, sports traumatology and surgical emergencies. But his love was always scuba diving. In 2000, when he was chief of diving medicine at Sharm el-Sheikh Hospital on the Red Sea, he decided to build a diving centre in Alexandria as a base for exploring the ancient, drowned city of Heracleion, the submerged remains of Cleopatra’s palace, and shipwrecks from the Napoleonic era and the First World War.
He has dived off Alexandria almost every day for the last 22 years, and seen firsthand how climate change has altered the waters.
About 15 years ago, he noticed that lionfish, a multicoloured fish covered in venomous spines that he had only spotted in the Red Sea, had migrated to the Mediterranean. The lionfish is a warm-water creature; Mr. Sabry concluded that the rising Med temperatures made the sea habitable for it. “The temperatures in the Med in the winter are not as cold as they used to be,” he says. “Now the temperature in December is what it used to be in November.”
About the same time, he noticed a die-off of marine life in Alexandria harbour during the summer’s savage heat. The locals blamed the event on a mysterious bacteria they called “the red,” after its colour (some scientific reports blamed pollution for the arrival of marine bacteria). Other new arrivals were the spiny black sea urchins that had been seen only in the Red Sea. Scientists have said that the creature, whose biological name is Diadema setosum, is lured by the warming Mediterranean.
In 2017, Spanish scientists wrote in the Pure and Applied Geophysics journal that, “A consistent warming trend has been found for Mediterranean SST [sea surface temperature] in the 1982-2016 period … with a much steeper trend for the last two decades.” The report concluded by calling the Med a “hot spot for climate change.”
The sea is warming because the climate is warming. In Britain, the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit determined that average temperatures in Egypt have increased by 0.4 degrees Celsius per decade. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that North Africa will warm by 1.5 degrees (over the 1995 to 2014 baseline period) by mid-century.
People fish on the concrete-covered shore in El Shatby district.
A waterfront covered in concrete blocks reminds Alexandrians every day that their world is changing. Not far away, in the Nile Delta, increasingly difficult agricultural conditions remind tens of thousands of farmers that their world is changing too.
Many Egyptian farmers do not understand the science behind climate change, or even the term itself. But as men and women of land that has been worked for 100 generations, they know that all is not right under their feet.
Sabyr Ashour, 43, and his family own a small farm covering two-thirds of a feddan (1 feddan is 0.4 hectares) about a 45-minute drive south of Alexandria, in the Nile Delta’s northwest. In recent years, they have noticed increasingly erratic weather patterns: hotter days, some nights that are cooler than usual, up and down humidity levels.
Their regular crops, including tomatoes and potatoes, seemed more prone to disease or simply grew to smaller-than-usual sizes. Falling yields were the upshot, forcing them to change the crop mix. Lately, they have experimented with coriander and basil.
Mr. Ashour does not know whether salinization on his land has intensified, but he fears it may have.
“I’m worried about climate change and salinization,” he said. “I’m worried about my life. Farming is the only thing I know how to do. I guess I will keep changing the crops until I find something that works.”
Farmer Sabyr Ashour has had to change his crops as staples such as tomatoes and potatoes succumbed to disease. He fears salinity in the Nile Delta has affected his yields.
The Nile Delta’s health, or lack thereof, is an existential matter for Egypt.
The delta starts just north of Cairo and, fed by the Nile and its branches, spreads out like a fan as it approaches the Mediterranean. From top to bottom, it spans about 150 kilometres. Its maximum width, along the coast, is 240 kilometres, stretching from Alexandria in the west to Port Said, north of the Suez Canal, in the east. The delta is densely populated, accounts for more than half of Egypt’s agricultural land, and has been farmed since the pharaonic era. Cotton, rice, wheat, maize, sugarcane, citrus fruits, potatoes and a variety of beans are among the region’s main crops.
Nevertheless, the country of 105 million (more than triple its 1970 level) cannot feed itself and is routinely the world’s biggest importer of wheat. The rising salinity in the farmlands will only exacerbate the domestic food shortage problem.
The farms with the greatest salinity lie closest to the Mediterranean, where the delta is subsiding; saline levels are gradually increasing father south. Warming temperatures are making the situation worse by increasing evaporation of the fresh irrigation water.
The Nile dams, notably the High Aswan Dam in Egypt’s deep south, halfway between Abu Simbel, near the Ethiopian frontier, and Luxor, are also contributing factors. Mr. Hafez, the former environment ministry boss, said no environmental impact study was done before the enormous embankment dam was constructed between 1960 and 1970 as the pet project of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who nationalized the Suez Canal.
The dam stopped the annual flooding that could destroy crops in high-water years; in low-water years, it can preserve water in the reservoir behind it – Lake Nasser. The bad news is that it also stopped the natural flow of sediments such as sand, silt and clay, plus a variety of nutrients, into the Nile Delta.
The lack of sediments is destabilizing the delta. “Less silt means more erosion and more encroachment of seawater,” Mr. Hafez said. “This makes the salinity of the soil higher.”
The Nile Delta’s rising salinity
Degree of soil salinization in Nile Delta
Non-saline soils
Slight saline soils
Moderate saline soils
Strong saline soils
Very strong
saline soils
Soil sample
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Jerusalem
Port Said
ISR.
Alexandria
JORDAN
Suez Canal
Cairo
Sinai
Peninsula
Suez
Nile River
Basin boundary
Asyut
SAUDI
ARABIA
MAIN NILE
Sharm
el-Sheikh
WESTERN DESERT
EGYPT
Luxor
Sediment build-up at the Aswan
High Dam is increasing the
evaporation rate and reducing the
storage capacity of Lake Nasser
while depriving nutrient-rich
deposits from reaching land
downstream.
RED
SEA
LAKE
NASSER
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, source: The Egyptian
Journal of Remote Sensing and Space
Science; american journal of climate change
The Nile Delta’s rising salinity
Degree of soil salinization in Nile Delta
Non-saline soils
Slight saline soils
Moderate saline soils
Strong saline soils
Very strong
saline soils
Soil sample
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Jerusalem
Port Said
ISR.
Alexandria
JORDAN
Suez Canal
Cairo
Sinai
Peninsula
Suez
Nile River
Basin boundary
Asyut
SAUDI
ARABIA
MAIN NILE
Sharm
el-Sheikh
WESTERN DESERT
EGYPT
Luxor
Sediment build-up at the Aswan
High Dam is increasing the
evaporation rate and reducing the
storage capacity of Lake Nasser
while depriving nutrient-rich
deposits from reaching land
downstream.
RED
SEA
LAKE
NASSER
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, source: The Egyptian
Journal of Remote Sensing and Space
Science; american journal of climate change
The Nile Delta’s rising salinity
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
IRAQ
Jerusalem
JORDAN
Port Said
ISR.
Alexandria
Degree of soil salinization in Nile Delta
Suez Canal
Non-saline soils
Cairo
Sinai
Peninsula
Suez
Slight saline soils
Moderate saline soils
Nile River
Basin boundary
Asyut
Strong saline soils
Sharm
el-Sheikh
MAIN NILE
Very strong
saline soils
Soil sample
WESTERN DESERT
EGYPT
Luxor
Sediment build-up at the Aswan High
Dam is increasing the evaporation
rate and reducing the storage capacity
of Lake Nasser while depriving
nutrient-rich deposits from reaching
land downstream.
LAKE
NASSER
RED SEA
SAUDI ARABIA
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, source: The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space
Science; american journal of climate change
Various forecasts present a dire scenario for food production in the region. The International Food Policy Research Institute expects a drop of more than 10 per cent by 2050 across Egypt due to higher temperatures and salt water intrusion. Some forecasts call for a more severe decrease.
Kamal Shaltout, professor of botany at Tanta University, in the heart of the Nile Delta, says scientists and farmers are scrambling to find crops that can tolerate saline in soil to help keep Egyptians fed. “We found that sugar beets and rice can adapt to salinity,” he said. “The trouble is, the saline is travelling south in the Nile Delta, and there is a lot of pollution, so everything is being affected.”
On Egypt’s Mediterranean waterfront, rising salinity is of minor concern; regular lashings from waves is the main worry. In the seaside town of Abu Qir, about 25 kilometres northeast of central Alexandria, the beach is disappearing, allowing the water to smash against the ground floors of a dense line of apartment buildings.
While the recent extension of the port seems to have raised the water levels in Abu Qir Bay, there is no little doubt that climate change is making a bad situation worse. “We used to put 20 tables on the beach for guests,” said Ayman Hamido, the owner of a fish restaurant facing the bay whose outdoor space is now limited to a small terrace. “Our beach is gone and the waves come right up to the building. It has not been good for our business.”
Ayman Hamido, a restauranteur in Abu Qir, says climate change has made it harder to earn a living.