Past and future trends of Egypt’s water consumption and its sources
Name
s41467-021-24747-9.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.96 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c974b14457539096a2db843fe2d3002b
Author(s)
Nikiel, Catherine A
Eltahir, Elfatih AB
Date Issued
December 2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Nikiel, C.A., Eltahir, E.A.B. Past and future trends of Egypt’s water consumption and its sources. Nat Commun 12, 4508 (2021)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
For millennia the Nile supplied Egypt with more water than needed. As the population grew and the economy expanded, demand on water increased accordingly. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis to reconstruct how total demand on water outstripped supply of the Nile water in the late 1970s, starting from a surplus of about 20 km3 per year in the 1960s leading to a deficit of about 40 km3 per year by the late 2010s. The gap is satisfied by import of virtual water. The role of economic growth in driving per capita demand on water is quantified based on detailed analysis of water use by agriculture and other sectors. We develop and test an empirical model of water demand in Egypt that relates demand on water to growth rates in the economy and population. Looking forward, we project that within this decade of the 2020 s, under nominal scenarios of population and economic growth, Egypt is likely to import more virtual water than the water supplied by the Nile, bringing into question the historical characterization of Egypt as “the gift of the Nile”.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24747-9
