The worst-case scenario, according to the UN climate panel (IPCC), is already written: “the sea will rise by one metre in 2050.” Then it will engulf “a third of the Nile Delta’s extremely fertile terrain, flooding historic cities like Alexandria.”
Due to offshore gas production and upstream Nile dams that prevent silt from solidifying its soil, the city of Alexander the Great lowers by three millimetres per year.
In contrast, because to warming and ice cap melting, the sea is rising as much.
In 2015 and 2020, hundreds of people already had to evacuate buildings damaged by floods. The Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources cautions that they are just the first of many.
In the Nile Delta, the sea has advanced 3 km inland since the 1960s. In the 1980s, the Rosetta lighthouse, built by Khedive Ismail at the very end of the 19th century, was engulfed by the waves.
“Climate change is now a reality and no longer just a warning,” says the head of the Egyptian Coastal Protection Authority Ahmed Abdelqader.
According to the IPCC, the Mediterranean will see some of the most extreme climate change because its deep waters will warm faster than all other oceans.
According to other Egyptian and UN estimates, in the best-case scenario, if the Mediterranean rises merely 50 centimetres, “30% of Alexandria will be inundated, 1.5 million or more people will be displaced, 195,000 jobs will be eliminated, and losses in land and construction will reach $30 trillion.”
The tragedy would affect the 104 million Egyptians because, as Mr. Abdelqader recalled, “together with its history and its traces of the past, Alexandria is also home to the largest port in the country,” which is the hub of the Egyptian economy. Abdelqader.
Alexandria has gained almost two million inhabitants in the last ten years and in the country, strangled by inflation and devaluation, investment in public infrastructure has not followed.
The city’s governor, Mohammed al-Sherif, recently explained that “the road drainage system was built to absorb one million cubic meters of rainfall, but now sometimes 18 cubic meters fall in a single day.
Not to mention the extreme weather events – temperature increases, rare rainfall, unprecedented snow events – that Alexandrians face.”
“We have never seen such heat in Alexandria at the end of October,” exclaims Mohammed Omar, 36.
While the rain is overdue, it is 26 degrees, or five degrees warmer than the seasonal average.
A city that still has its art-deco cafes and Haussmann buildings from the early 20th century cannot survive today.
In a speech that froze Egyptians’ blood, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was all that was needed to bid Alexandria “farewell” during COP26 in Glasgow last year.
“Yes, the danger exists and we do not deny it, but we are launching projects to mitigate it,” said Abdelqader.
To protect people and land, a belt of reeds has been planted along 69 kilometers of coastline.
“The sand aggregates around it and together they form a natural barrier,” he explains. Soon, devices for warning and measuring waves will be put in place.
The past is likewise under jeopardy. On a sliver of land battered by ever-rising waves, the stronghold of Qaitbay was constructed in the fourteenth century.
5,000 concrete blocks were used to break the waves and support this Mamluk fortification, which was built on the location of the Alexandria lighthouse that vanished in antiquity. Along the cornice, other blocks all but eliminate the damage.
With its long history of creation and obliteration, Alexandria does not wish to see its heritage disappear.
There was its lighthouse, the largest library in the world, a temple of knowledge ravaged by fire… Today, its modest heir, an immense architect’s building on the cornice, like the rest of the city, must be saved, pleads Mr. Abdelqader.
For this, “the West has a moral responsibility: it must help to counter the negative effects of climate change, which is the result of its choices of civilization.
The COP27, which will open on November 6 in Egypt, will be there to remind us of this”.
