Sea level rise threatens Alexandria, Nile Delta

By Dina Zayed
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt | Sun Nov 14, 2010 9:33am EST (Reuters) – Twenty years ago, Taher Ibrahim raced his friends across Alexandria’s beaches, now rising seas have swept over his favorite childhood playground. Alexandria, with 4 million people, is Egypt’s second-largest city, an industrial center and a port that handles four-fifths of national trade. It is also one of the Middle East’s cities most at risk from rising sea levels due to global warming. “There were beaches I used to go to in my lifetime, now those beaches are gone. Is that not proof enough?” asked Ibrahim, a manager at a supermarket chain who is in his 40s. Flooding could displace entire communities in Alexandria and the low-lying Nile Delta, the fertile agricultural heartland of Egypt’s 79 million people. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Mediterranean will rise 30 cm to 1 meter this century. More than half of Egypt’s people live within 100 km of the coast. A 2007 World Bank study estimated that a one-meter sea level rise could displace 10 percent of the population. Officials say salt water could submerge or soak 10 to 12 percent of farmland in the world’s largest wheat importer. “Climate change is happening at a pace that we had not anticipated,” Suzan Kholeif of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries told Reuters. “Our records are clear and in my line of work, it is already a reality.” … More than 58 meters of coastline have vanished every year since 1989 in Rasheed, also known as Rosetta, said Omran Frihy of the Coastal Research Institute. … “Sooner or later, a disaster will happen but when, where and how, we aren’t certain. But we shouldn’t wait for a catastrophe to come knocking on our doors to act,” Kholeif said. … A biologist, who has seen sea species disappear due to higher acidity, she said that with 108 endangered species Egypt was the Arab nation whose biodiversity was most at risk. Taxi driver Ahmed Fattah said he doubted Alexandria itself would disappear beneath the Mediterranean but that he and his family could only wait and see. “I worry that the government won’t do anything until a crisis hits us. By then, we may be swept away by the waves.”