With global warming and the rise in the level of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt could lose one of its treasures: Alexandria with its port, its ancient ruins, its six million inhabitants. The group of UN climate experts (IPCC) has already written the worst-case scenario: in 2050 “the sea will rise by one meter”. Then it will “swallow a third of the ultra-fertile lands of the Nile Delta and historic cities like Alexandria will be flooded.” Every year the city of Alexandria sinks three millimeters, weakened by the dams of the Nile upstream, which prevent the silt from consolidating its bottom, and by drilling gas in the sea. Conversely, the sea rises under the action of heating and melting of the ice cap .
Hundreds of people have already had to evacuate buildings weakened by flooding in 2015 and then in 2020. They are just the first of a long cohort, Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources has warned. In the Nile Delta, the sea has advanced three kilometers inland since the 1960s. “Climate change is now a reality and not just a warning,” Egyptian Coast Guard chief Ahmed Abdelqader told AFP.
Climate change in the Mediterranean will be among the most drastic in the world because its deep waters will warm more than any ocean, the IPCC warns. In the best-case scenario, if the Mediterranean rises just 50 centimeters, as other Egyptian and UN studies estimate, “30% of Alexandria will be inundated, 1.5 million or more people will be displaced, 195,000 jobs will be destroyed, and land losses and construction will be $30,000 billion The catastrophe will have repercussions for the 104 million Egyptians, because “in addition to its history and its traces of the past, Alexandria is also home to the largest port in the country,” the nerve center of Egypt’s economy, recalls Mr. Abdelqader. Alexandria has in recent ten years, almost two million inhabitants have been added and in the country choked by inflation and devaluation, there has been no investment in public infrastructure.
The Corniche of Alexandria in Egypt, February 16, 2022. (MANUEL COHEN / AFP)
For example, the city’s governor, Mohammed al-Shérif, recently stated that “the drainage of the streets was built to accommodate a million cubic meters of rainfall, but today sometimes 18 fall in a single day”. Not to mention the extreme weather events – rising temperatures, infrequent rainfall, unprecedented snowfalls – that the Alexandrians face. “We’ve never seen heat like this in Alexandria at the end of October,” 26 degrees, five more than the seasonal norm, while the rain is long overdue, exclaims Mohammed Omar, 36. Today, the city, which has preserved Art Deco cafes and Haussmannian buildings from its early 20th-century cosmopolitan heyday, can’t handle it.
It didn’t take Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, to bid his “farewell” to Alexandria at last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, in a speech that chilled Egyptian blood. “Yes, the risk is there and we do not deny it, but we are launching projects to mitigate it,” assures Mr. Abdelqader. To protect people and land, a reed belt was planted along the 69-kilometer coastline. “The sand collects around it and together they form a natural barrier,” he explains. Wave warning and measuring devices will soon be installed. Inheritance is also at risk. At the forefront is the citadel of Qaitbay, built in the 15th century on a narrow promontory battered by ever-higher waves. To protect this Mamluk fort, built on the site of the Alexandria lighthouse that disappeared in ancient times, 5,000 concrete blocks were installed to break the waves and support the building. Other blocks mitigate damage along the edge.
The city of Alexandria in Egypt, October 31, 2022. (KHALED DESOUKI / AFP)
Alexandria, with its long history of construction and demolition, no longer wants to see its legacy disappear. There was its lighthouse, the world’s greatest library, a fire-ravaged temple of knowledge… Today its humble heiress, a huge architect’s building on the cornice, like the rest of the city, needs to be saved, argues Mr Abdelkader. “The West has a moral responsibility for this: it must help to counteract the negative effects of climate change, which is the result of its civilizational decisions”. The COP27, which opens in Egypt on November 6th, will be there to remind us of that.