Water resources management in Egypt is a complex process that involves multiple stakeholders who use water for irrigation, municipal and industrial water supply, hydropower generation and navigation. In addition, the waters of the Nile support aquatic ecosystems that are threatened by abstraction and pollution. Egypt also has substantial fossil groundwater resources in the Western Desert.
A key problem of water resources management in Egypt is the imbalance between increasing water demand and limited supply. To ensure future water availability coordination with the nine upstream Nile riparian countries is essential. The Nile Basin Initiative provides a forum for such cooperation. In the 1990s the government launched three mega-projects to increase irrigation on "new lands". They are located in the Toshka area (the "New Valley"), on the fringe of the Western Nile Delta, and in the Northern Sinai. These projects all require substantial amounts of water that can only be mobilized through better irrigation efficiency on already irrigated "old lands" as well as the reuse of drainage water and treated wastewater.
The management of the water supply in Egypt is expected to get more complicated as climate change increases the variability of weather, puts increasing pressure on upstream countries, and causes sea level rise which will cause saltwater intrusion and salinisation on delta lands.
History
The history of modern water management in Egypt begins with the construction of the Old Aswan Dam in 1902 and barrages on the Nile in the 19th and early 20th century. The Old Aswan Dam partially stored the waters of the Nile to allow the growing of multiple crops per year in the Nile Delta, while the barrages raised the water level of the Nile so that water could be diverted into large irrigation channels running in parallel to the river. The water regime of the river was changed fundamentally in 1970 when the Aswan High Dam was completed, eliminating the annual Nile flood. The dam brought major benefits such as increased water availability for Egyptian agriculture leading to higher income and employment, hydropower production, flood control, improved navigation, and the creation of fisheries in Lake Nasser. But it also had environmental and social impacts including resettlement, loss of fertile silt that now accumulates in the reservoir behind the dam, waterlogging combined with an increase in soil salinity, and increased coastal erosion.
Unrelated to the construction of the Aswan High Dam, water quality deteriorated through drainage return flows and discharges of untreated municipal and industrial wastewater. Beginning in the 1980s wastewater treatment improved and water quality in the Nile gradually improved again. Until 1992 the government decided which crops farmers had to grow, which allowed the authorities to deliver specific volumes of water to each canal based on the water needs of the crops. In 1992 a major change occurred when cropping patterns were liberalized and farmers were free to grow what they wanted. At the same time the government began to transfer the responsibility for the management of branch canals to water user associations, a process called "irrigation management transfer". In the mid-1990s the government also initiated three mega-projects to expand irrigation to "new lands" in the desert.
Infrastructure
Existing infrastructure
Water resources management in Egypt depends on a complex set of infrastructure along the entire length of the river. The key element of this infrastructure is the Aswan High Dam that forms Lake Nasser. The High Dam protects Egypt from floods, stores water for year-round irrigation and produces hydropower. With a live storage capacity of 90 billion cubic the dam stores more than one and a half the average annual flow of the Nile River, thus providing a high level of regulation in the river basin compared to other regulated rivers in the world.
Downstream of the Aswan Dam, there are seven barrages to increase the river's water level so that it can flow into first-level irrigation canals. One of them is the 350 km long Ibrahimiya Canal completed in 1873, the largest artificial canal in the world. It branches off the left bank of the Nile in Assiut and then runs parallel to the river. Its discharge was increased by the Assiut Barrage completed in 1903. Other large barrages exist at Esna and Naga Hammadi on the main Nile, as well as the Delta Barrage, the Zifta Barrage and the Damietta Barrage on the Damietta branch and the Edfina barrage on the Rosetta branch of the Nile. Water also flows from the Nile to the Faiyum Oasis through a canal called Bahr Yussef that dates back to Pharaonic times. From the oasis it flows to the Birket Qarun (Lake Moesis). The Fresh Water Canal runs from Cairo to Ismailia and the Sweet Water Canal runs in parallel to the Suez Canal, supplying drinking water to the cities along the Canal. Both canals were completed in 1863. The Mahmoudiyah Canal links the Nile to Alexandria. Completed in 1820 it used to have an important role for navigation, but nowadays is used primarily for irrigation and to supply Alexandria with drinking water.
Irrigation canals are classified into principal canals (Rayah), main canals (first level canals), branch canals (second level canals), distribution canals (, or third level canals) and irrigation ditches (Merwas).M.N. Allam, Department of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University:Participatory Irrigation Water Management in Egypt: Review and Analysis, Option méditerranéennes Series B, n° 48, no date (probably 2004). Retrieved 15 November 2009. Flow in the principal and main canals is continuous; in the branch and distribution canals it is on a rotation basis. However, the government supports a process of converting some of the lower-level canals gradually to continuous flow. Farmers pump water from the to irrigate fields (lift: about 0.5–1.5 m). A typically serves an area of 50 to 200 feddan (20 to 80 hectares). In areas where there is no formal operational structure for proper water distribution, the tail-end users usually are not getting enough water to maintain crops.International Programme for Technology and Research in Irrigation and Drainage (IPTRID) Secretariat, 2005. Rapid Assessment Study Towards Integrated Planning of Irrigation and Drainage in Egypt Final Report 2005 Water user associations have been formed beginning in the 1990s to better distribute water among farmers on a and to rationalize pumping, with the aim of reducing water abstraction, pumping costs and to increase yields.
In 1994 Egypt had approximately 30,000 km of public canals (first and second level), 17,000 km of public drains, 80,000 km of private third-level canals () and irrigation ditches, 450,000 private water-lifting devices (sakias or pumps), 22,000 public water-control structures, and 670 large public pumping stations for irrigation.Martin Hvidt: "Water resource planning in Egypt", in: Eric Watkins (Editor): The Middle Eastern Environment, , 1995
Drainage through sub-surface drains and drainage channels is essential to prevent a deterioration of crop yields from soil salinization and waterlogging. By 2003 more than 2 million ha have been equipped with a subsurface drainage system and approximately 7.2 billion m3 of water is drained annually from areas with these systems. The total investment cost in agricultural drainage over 27 years from 1973 to 2002 was about 3.1 billion US$ covering the cost of design, construction, maintenance, research and training. During this period 11 large-scale projects were implemented with financial support from World Bank and other donorsMinistry of Water Resources and Irrigation, Egyptian Public Authority for Drainage Projects, Drainage Research Institute, 2006: The National Drainage and Drainage Water Reuse Programs, Egypt, Local Actions at the 4th World Water Forum, 2 March 2007. Retrieved 28 April 2010.
Irrigation Improvement Program Water savings in agriculture are an important objective of Egypt's water strategy to serve a growing population with limited resources. However, the magnitude of potential water savings in agriculture and how best to achieve such savings have been a subject of some debate. While "classical" field-level irrigation efficiencies may be low due to the predominance of flood irrigation, the overall system efficiency – the "effective irrigation efficiency" – is quite high due to return flows. Water savings strategies in Egypt therefore do not focus much on water-saving irrigation technologies such as sprinkler or drip irrigation. Instead, they are based on the observation that when farmers lack control of the timing and quantities of water supply, they irrigate too soon and apply too much water.
The feasibility of water savings in Egyptian agriculture was first assessed through pilot projects under the USAID-supported Egypt Water Use and Management Project (EWUP) begun in 1977. The pilots showed that to achieve water savings, it was important to allow farmers to participate more in irrigation management through water user associations, to provide continuous flow instead of rotational flow in , to replace individual by collective pumping, and to create an irrigation advisory service. The 1980 "Strategy for Irrigation Development in Egypt up to the year 2000" already envisaged the improvement of control and distribution of irrigation water as a first phase of the strategy. This was to be followed by the development of field irrigation systems and direct pricing of irrigation water. Based on the lessons of EWUPEgyptian Water Use Management Project (EWUP), 1984. Improving Egypt's Irrigation System in the Old Lands, Final Report. Colorado State University and Ministry of Public Works and Water Resources and the irrigation strategy the government set out the National Irrigation Improvement Program (IIP) in 1984, which was approved by the National Assembly in 1985. Its implementation began, again with support from USAID, in eleven pilot areas, beginning with the Serri Canal with 120,000 feddan (50,400 hectares) in Minya Governorate. The project replaced the old low-lying either with raised , from which water would flow to the fields via gravity, or with buried pressurized pipes. The value engineering techniques have been used to evaluate the optimum alternative targeting the minimum cost without affecting the quality of the alternative.Mohammed Helmy Mahmoud Moustafa Elsanabary By 1998 about 1,100 water user associations had been formed and systems irrigating 129,000 feddan had been modernized.Impacts of the Irrigation Improvement Projects in Egypt, Consultancy Report to the Egyptian-Dutch Advisory Panel on Land Drainage and Drainage Related Water Management by R.J. Oosterbaan, International Institute for Land Reclamation and Improvement (ILRI), Wageningen, The Netherlands, 1999. Retrieved 28 April 2010. The project reduced water losses, improved water quality at the tail end of , made more water available to farmers at the tail end of canals, saved land due to the smaller size of the new , reduced pumping costs by more than 50% and increased yields between 5% and 30%. Building on this success the concept of farmer participation in irrigation management was extended to branch canals with the creation of Branch Canal Water Users Association (BCWUAs) beginning in 1997 in Qemri, Bahr el Dahram and Balaqtar branch canals (Lower Egypt) and El Reity canal (Upper Egypt), as well as in Fayoum. This process was supported by two USAID-funded projects, the LIFE (Livelihood and Income from the Environment) project (2005–2008) and the Integrated Water Resources Management II project (2009–2012).