El Niño is here — and Egypt will not be spared: As Egypt continues to face heatwaves, the impacts of global warming are being felt more than ever. Adding fuel to the fire, meteorologists around the world declared that El Niño is currently underway. While research on El Niño’s impacts typically focuses on regions surrounding the Pacific Ocean, the event impacts climate patterns worldwide. We spoke with climate scientists on what Egypt can expect in terms of El Niño’s impact and what kind of measures can be taken to adapt.

Did you miss Enterprise Climate’s two-part El Niño explainer? Catch up here and here.

Okay, but what’s El Niño? It’s a cyclical, naturally occuring weather phenomenon with different effects in various regions around the world that happens every two to seven years. It’s the result of the unusual warming of water surface temperature in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Go hit those explainers if you want to dive deep.

El Niño makes drought worse in our part of the world: A study (pdf) published in Nature (arguably the world’s most respected scientific journal) last year found that El Niño helps make drought worse in Nile River Basin (NRB) countries — including Egypt. That study confirmed research (pdf) carried out two decades ago that concluded some 30% of the Nile river’s annual water level fluctuations could be linked to the weather phenomenon. “El Niño reduces the volume of rainfall over the NRB, while also increasing the rate of evaporation due to the higher temperatures it brings,” Eman Sayed told Enterprise. Sayed is an irrigation water management adviser to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and former head of planning at Egypt’s Water and Irrigation Ministry.

Egypt’s water loss is intensifying with rising heat: Around 25-30% of the water used for irrigation in Upper Egypt is lost to evaporation and seepage, climate researcher Shereif Mahmoud told Enterprise, pointing towards high rates of evaporation from uncovered canals as one of the factors. A study (pdf) published by the American University in Cairo found that the water that could be saved from covering the Sheikh Zayed canal — part of the Toshka irrigation project — is equivalent to the amount needed to cultivate 7% of the land area allocated to the project per year.

More evaporation = more water extraction: When there is scarcely any rainfall, farmers tend to withdraw water from surrounding water sources such as lakes, canals, and rivers instead. As drought conditions intensify, the rate of precipitation will not be able to catch up with the rate of extraction. This could leave Egypt with a major shortage in groundwater reserves, posing a hurdle for large agricultural projects in the works, including the 1.5 mn feddan agricultural project dubbed Egypt’s Future, the New Delta reclamation project, and the Toshka El Khair project.

And the situation will likely worsen with time: The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will both reduce the quantity of water flowing into Egypt’s river and lakes significantly, and contribute to increased evaporation rates in those water bodies, Mahmoud said. Due to large amounts of water being stored behind the dam, the river flow speed drops rapidly, increasing the rate of evaporation, especially when coupled with lower water levels. “The Ethiopian dam will exacerbate the impact of Egypt’s droughts, especially as countries closer to the Nile’s source will also face lower levels of rainfall,” Eman said.

El Niño will likely mean sea levels rising faster on our coasts — and that fishers catches decline:Stronger El Niño events may accelerate melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and ice shelves, speeding up the rise in sea levels beyond current projections. Both the Mediterranean and Red seas are witnessing approximately a three centimeter increase in sea levels each year, Mahmoud said, with the potential for further increases during El Niño years. This also impacts fishing productivity, which falls as the sea's temperature rises and will likely be exacerbated during intensifying El Niño conditions, he added.

Speaking of coastlines… El Niño is only one part of the bigger El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) atmospheric occurrence. The “cool phase” is represented by La Niña, which is mostly characterized by higher precipitation, Mahmoud said, leading Egypt’s coastal regions to face the most intensified impacts of the increased rainfall. Given the lack of a sufficient stormwater system, this can cause flooding and a high level of infrastructure damage when the weather pattern flips.

Predicting the frequency and intensity of cycles: Global warming has increased the intensity of ENSO cycles and shifted their timings, making them less predictable, Diana Francis told Enterprise. Francis is a climate scientist and head of Khalifa University Environmental and Geophysical Sciences Lab in Dubai. This year’s event started two months earlier than expected, beginning in the summer instead of fall and spiking already warm temperatures, she added. The intensity of the storm that hit Egypt and the region in 2020 is another example — an event of that magnitude hadn’t occurred in the last 200 years, Sayed said.

So what can be done? Agricultural practices need a facelift to cope with the future. Prioritizing growing crops with less water requirements, transitioning to modern irrigation methods to save on water consumption such as drip irrigation, and introducing crops that can handle a higher salinity are all ways to transform our agricultural practices to need less water, Mahmoud explains. Installing floating solar panels on canals can be another method of reducing water loss and generating renewable energy.

Tapping into tech and AI: Remote sensors — predicting future levels of solar radiation, earth’s temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation — could be used to estimate the water consumption needed for different crops, indicating what types of crops would be suitable to grow based on Egypt’s water availability, Mahmoud tells us. Increasing the number of climate monitoring stations across the country would also help foresee increased drought conditions, allowing for better preparation and implementation of adaptive measures, he added.

Egypt does have some strategies in place:There are some ongoing national projects that could help reduce water stress during droughts, including reusing agricultural drainage water through initiatives such as the construction of th e Bahr El Baqar plant, Sayed says. Then there’s the desalination strategy, which envisages adding 8.85 mn cbm/d of processing capacity by the middle of the century. Egypt also has 1.5k rainwater and flood harvesting stations — one of the highest in the region, she adds. Coastal protection measures such as beach nourishment and concrete barriers are also being implemented, in support of an adaptation initiative led by the Green Climate Fund and the UNDP . The Water and Irrigation Ministry also established the Flood Forecasting Office in the 1990s, which tracks climate change and takes it into account in models that make predictions on drought and flood cycles in the next 100 years.

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