page_title: Water resources management in Egypt
section_title: Current resources
hierarchical_section_title: Water resources management in Egypt / Water resources / Current resources
caption_attribution_description: Nile
context_page_description: Water resources management in modern 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, 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.
context_section_description: Egypt depends for 97% of its water supply on the Nile. Rainfall is minimal at 18 mm per year, occurring mainly during autumn and winter time. The 1959 Nile waters treaty between Egypt and Sudan allocates 55.5 billion cubic meter of water per year to Egypt, without specifying any allocation for upstream riparians besides Sudan (18.5 billion cubic meters per year). Actual water use by Egypt is widely believed to be in excess of the allocation under the 1959 agreement. There is no water sharing agreement among all ten riparian countries of the Nile. However, the riparian countries cooperate through the Nile Basin Initiative.
  Egypt has four main groundwater aquifers: the Nile Aquifer, the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, the Moghra Aquifer between the West of the Nile Delta and the Qattara Depression, and coastal aquifers on the North-Western coast. The Nile Aquifer, the Moghra Aquifer and the Coastal Aquifer are renewable. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System which contains 150,000 billion m³ of freshwater, equivalent to almost 3,000 times the annual flow of the Nile, is non-renewable. It is shared with Sudan, Chad and Libya. Egypt's non-conventional water resources include agricultural sawage, salt water desalination, brackish water desalination and municipal wastewater reuse
  *) See also: Irrigation from the Aswan dam for agriculture and the water flow chart
caption: Feluccas on the Nile
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