Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

by Marshall Plane

From its origins in the Ethiopian Highlands to its endpoint in the Mediterranean, the Nile River lays out a great bastion of life amid the barren deserts of northeastern Africa, sustaining civilizations along its fertile banks for over five thousand years. Today, almost 140 million people live in this thin green ribbon, making it one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. The calendar for this population always revolved around the flooding of the Nile, which deposits silt that allows for the plentiful harvests that make Egypt the breadbasket of the Middle East. Egypt’s civilization has gained worldwide renown, and despite centuries of foreign rule, after expelling its British occupiers in 1952 Egypt once again became a premier regional power. Sudan, upriver from Egypt, may have had a less pleasant experience in the years since decolonization, but it too has been home to advanced and prosperous civilizations for millennia. However, these nations’ survival is deeply dependent on a delicate natural balance, and the pace of global ecological change has made many experts increasingly worried that this balance will collapse, creating potentially the worst humanitarian crisis in living memory (1).

Back at the Nile’s origins, Ethiopia has always been somewhat forgotten in comparison to the nations upriver. It was once a wealthy seafaring nation, but defeats by the early Arab caliphates forced the Ethiopians to retreat into the highlands around 700 AD, and from that point on Ethiopia remained largely poor and isolated. During the 20th century, it suffered from a brutal Italian invasion, several unstable authoritarian regimes, and multiple devastating famines, helping to make it one of the poorest countries on the planet. Today, however, Ethiopia has the world’s fastest-growing economy and is in a prime position to become the leading African power (2). The near-complete Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) promises to expedite this process by generating up to 30,000 megawatts of electricity for Ethiopia (3). This dam along the Nile River has the potential to not only bring cheap electricity to all of the nation’s 108 million people, but also to make Ethiopia the chief energy supplier of all its neighbors, greatly enriching it and lifting possibly tens of millions out of poverty.

The near-completion of the GERD is less welcome news to Ethiopia’s downriver neighbors, Egypt and to a lesser extent Sudan. The idea of the river that sustains life in those countries suddenly being under the control of one of their rivals is understandably frightening. Egyptian experts are increasingly worried about how to feed the country’s population of 103 million and counting as climate change threatens to deplete harvests, and say that the damming of the river than sustains Egyptian agriculture will only accelerate the path towards this crisis. Ethiopian leaders have pointed out that the GERD could benefit Egypt and Sudan by helping to control the level to which the Nile floods, preventing those catastrophic occurrences of over- and under-flooding (4). But to Egyptian leadership, the prospect of Ethiopia having control over the Nile is precisely the problem: they see it as a threat to their nation’s sovereignty (5). As such, every attempt to negotiate a legally binding agreement has broken down. In 2014, Egypt even threatened war, prompting Ethiopia to install anti-aircraft guns on the construction site (6). Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and war never took place.

With the dam near completion, negotiations resumed in summer 2020, but Egypt failed to extract concessions. Sudan, which has generally occupied a moderate position between its two neighbors, has now joined Ethiopia in pushing for the finalization of an agreement to share the right to use the Nile’s fifty-five billion cubic meters of water between the three nations (4). Regardless of the eventual result, this crisis is potentially a canary in the coal mine for the worst effects of climate change. As warmer temperatures make rainfall more and more scarce, depleting harvests across the globe, affected countries may increasingly come into conflict over control of rivers. For example, the great rivers that sustain the massive population of India all have their origin in the Tibetan mountains, which are under Chinese control. A full-on war between the two most populated countries on earth is a frightening prospect. Other potential conflicts could occur between India and Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq, or even the US and Mexico. We can only hope the world leadership realizes that everyone would lose if the world erupted into such conflicts, and that instead of adopting an every-nation-for-itself mentality they will work together against the common enemy of climate change.