Falling prey to global warming and human overexploitation on its banks, the world's second longest river is in danger. The Nile River, which is 6,600 kilometers long, is prone to drought. And Egypt, which is hosting the global climate summit "Cup 27" in Sharm el-Sheikh, today finds itself facing a serious shortage of water.

In just fifty years, the flow rate of river water has experienced a noticeable decrease from three thousand cubic meters/second to 2830 cubic meters/second, which is a hundred times less than the flow rate of the Amazon River. But this is just the beginning; in the face of reduced rainfall and more pronounced droughts in East Africa, the amount of water available per capita could decrease by 70 percent by 2100, according to the worst forecasts of the United Nations.

It is a phenomenon whose consequences are undoubtedly dire for the millions of African inhabitants whose survival is guaranteed by the river. Concern is sweeping the ten countries where this large river flows - Tanzania, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt - everyone is afraid of shrinking agricultural land, loss of crops and the cessation of electricity generation.

According to a study conducted by six researchers from American and British universities in 2020 based on historical and geological data of the last hundred thousand years, it is possible for Lake Victoria to disappear from existence within five hundred years.

The Nile River basin covers 10 percent of Africa and is an essential resource for about 500 million people living on its banks. A fact that makes the decline of the Nile flood due to global warming alarming،

So the decline of the Nile flood will only worsen the situation of millions of people who depend on the flow of its waters and who already do not have enough of them today. Moreover, it is likely that over time many people will suffer from high salinity in the Delta lands of northern Egypt.

The Nile Delta, located in northern Egypt, is the third most fragile place on Earth in the face of global warming. With the increasing weakening of its flow, the waters of the river are no longer able to push the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, whose level continues to rise (about 15 centimeters in the twentieth century).

Since 1960, the waters of the Big Blue Sea have been devouring between 35 and 75 meters of Delta territory annually. It is enough for the sea level to rise by only one meter to be able to swallow 34 percent of the area of this region and force 9 million people to flee their homes.

Ultimately, the waters of the Mediterranean Sea can devour about one hundred thousand hectares of agricultural land in the Delta, which is located at an altitude of less than ten meters above sea level, approximately equal to the area of the French island of La Reunion, according to the United Nations Environment Program. It is a disaster that will hit the northern region of Egypt, from which about 30% to 40% of the national agricultural production comes.

The Nile River also provides electrical energy to residents of the ten countries it crosses. Sudan, for example, gets more than half of its electricity needs from hydropower. In Uganda, that figure is about 80 percent.

Addis Ababa already boasts that it has the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa. But for Cairo, this is a source of tension caused by the non-observance of a 1959 agreement with Khartoum, without Ethiopia, granting 66 percent of the annual flow of the Nile to Egypt and 22 percent to Sudan.

Today, Egypt fears a sharp decrease in the flow of the Nile River to it if the GERD is filled too quickly. But this topic raises a lot of controversy within the scientific community itself: researchers accuse each other of exaggerating the losses of water reaching Egypt to justify intervening by force in Ethiopia, while others are accused of minimizing these losses and"betraying" their country.

This presents an additional problem for Sudan, which is struggling to manage its water resources due to the lack of a storage or recycling system for rainwater or agricultural water. Hunger is already threatening a third of the population there. Like Sudan, the other Nile Valley countries are all at the bottom of the ranking of the "Notre Dame global" climate change index. For Kaliste tendimugaya, from the Ugandan Ministry of water and environment, "the warming effect will be enormous". "If we have rare, but dry rains, we will experience floods, and if we have long periods without rain, we will have fewer water resources,"he said. The official pauses for a moment before continuing: "we can't survive without her".