“The Nile Delta is a kind of Bangladesh story,” says Dr Rick Tutwiler, director of the American University in Cairo’s Desert Development Centre, quoted in a recent article in the Guardian by journalist Jack Shenker “You’ve got a massive population, overcrowding, a threat to all natural resources from the pressure of all the people, production, pollution, cars and agricultural chemicals. And on top of all that, there’s the rising sea. It’s the perfect storm.”
The other big story about Egypt is is exploding population. In 1960, it stood at 27.8 million. Today, it’s 83 million; on current trends, that will hit 110 million within two decades. Population on the Nile Delta stands at 4,000 per square mile. This is a trajectory to disaster.
Shenker was guest this morning on The Wide Angle with Karen Coleman on Newstalk, where I was a studio guest adding commentary on the climate change implications of the growing crisis in the Nile delta. Karen operates a video blog within the studio, and posts videos of all her studio interviews onto her own website – an interesting radio/video/web twist to broadcasting. The clip is below:
