Water is a Dam Pain

Leo Dong -

In history class, the Mesopotamians and Egyptians are often presented as the earliest examples of how access to water is essential for the rise of civilisation. Lessons would depict the Nile as having yearly floods, where the silt that flowed from Lake Tana and Lake Victoria (the sources of the Blue and White Nile) was a natural fertiliser for intensive agriculture, supporting early civilisation.

At its peak, the population of Egypt may have reached up to 8 million people[1], all living within a few kilometres of the Nile. The scale is honestly unimaginable for that time. This was only possible due to the largely predictable, nutrient-rich annual flood cycle - something unmatched anywhere else in the natural world. The Nile was a miracle.

However, no civilisation can easily survive the breakdown of its food system. Each time the floods failed,[2] the burgeoning population starved and revolted.[3]

Modern Egyptians have encountered these problems as well, which led to the building of the Aswan High Dam,[4] allowing Egypt to control when and how much water enters the Nile Delta, dampening both droughts and floods. It also, however, decreased the amount of nutrients[5] deposited via silt, meaning that modern industrial agriculture was needed to compensate for the lost elements.

However, damming is not all roses. Ethiopia built the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam recently,[6] similar to but upstream of the Aswan High Dam on the Blue Nile. Since the flow of water (and thus agricultural usage) per year is generally a zero-sum game, tensions have inflamed between the neighbours as Egypt has now lost water security for its population of over 110 million people.[7] Currently, both countries are still attempting political solutions to this problem,[8] but we can see how water rights have escalated into violence elsewhere.[9][10][11]

Another takeaway from this is that all areas with water-rights issues are potential flashpoints for future conflict. If you want to visit them in your lifetime, it might be wise to do so sooner rather than later.

  1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Egypt-population-in-old-era_tbl1_279530715#:~:text=Though the population of ancient,antiquity . ↩︎

  2. Which would have happened a few times across the ~3000 years of Ancient Egypt. ↩︎

  3. https://www.science.smith.edu/climatelit/nile-river-flood-failure-in-ptolemaic-ancient-egypt-c-300-bce/#:~:text=In Ptolemaic Egypt%2C several instances,other large bodies of water. ↩︎

  4. Between 1960 and 1970. ↩︎

  5. Mostly Nitrogen and Phosphorus. ↩︎

  6. Completed in 2023 and financed mostly domestically. ↩︎

  7. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3dgx36gn5o. ↩︎

  8. With Egypt cozying up to Somalia, who are in turn upstream of Ethiopia. ↩︎

  9. The Six-Day War between Israel and Syria; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War. ↩︎

  10. War over the Jordan River between Israel, Syria and Jordan; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(Jordan_River)#:~:text=The War over Water%2C also,the Jordan River drainage basin. ↩︎

  11. The current tensions in Kashmir between India and Pakistan over the Indus River; https://www.csis.org/analysis/can-india-cut-pakistans-indus-river-lifeline. ↩︎