Facts: The Nile
The Nile is roughly 660 miles long and is usually considered the world’s longest river, although some claim that it comes second only to the Amazon.
The Nile is formed by two main water flows: the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The White Nile comes from Lake Victoria in Uganda. The largest tributary to the lake is the Kagera River, south of the equator, which is counted as the source flow of the Nile.
The source flows of the Blue Nile come from the Ethiopian highlands.
After winding its way through several countries in East Africa, the Nile flows in the far north into the Mediterranean Sea in a large delta in Egypt.
The name Nile comes from the Greek word Neilos, which may be derived to mean valley or river valley.
Source: Nationalencyklopedin.se, Britannica.com
The mighty Nile has its source in Uganda, where 42-year-old Christine Nalwadda Kalema lives. Using hydropower from the river, she can light her small shop and her home near Africa’s largest lake, Lake Victoria, where the Nile’s 660-mile journey north begins. But it is possible that the supply of electricity will not remain.
“If we have a decrease in rainfall, it will lead to a decrease in the potential for hydropower,” says Revocatus Twinomuhangi at Makerere University’s Center for Climate Change in Kampala.
The last five to ten years have brought more drought, but also intense rain, floods and intense heat than before, he says.
In 500 years, Lake Victoria may have disappeared entirely, according to a study by British and American scientists. The study is based on geological data of the last 100,000 years.
The map shows the Nile’s stretch from Lake Victoria to the delta at the Mediterranean Sea. Not unaffected
Further north, in Sudan, 50 percent of the population lives along the Nile and over half of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower. There, 17-year-old Mohammed Jomaa works on the fertile river bank in Alty in the state of Gezira.
“The Nile is the most important thing for us,” he says.
— We really don’t want anything to change.
But the Nile is not unaffected by the outside world. In the last 50 years, the water flow has decreased from 3,000 cubic meters per second to 2,830, and when the water flow decreases, it cannot keep out the Mediterranean waters, which have risen by around 15 centimeters in the last century due to climate change.
And the risk is that it will get worse. If East Africa suffers several dry spells, the flow could decrease by 70 percent, according to the UN’s most dire forecasts.
100 meters every year
In the far north, where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea, between 35 and 75 meters of the Nile Delta has disappeared every year for the past six decades. If the sea level rises by one meter, a third of the green region would disappear, according to the UN. It would force nine million people to flee.
And if temperatures continue to rise, the Mediterranean Sea will advance another 100 meters into the delta each year, and seawater could eventually take over 100,000 hectares of the region’s prime farmland, according to the United Nations Environment Program UNEP. It would be a disastrous development for Egypt because the area accounts for between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s agricultural production. In the country, all but three percent of the 104 million inhabitants live along the river, on just eight percent of the country’s surface.
Pumps fresh water
In the community of Kafr El-Dawar – which lies one and a half miles inland – salt from the Mediterranean Sea has seeped into large parts of the land, which worsens the conditions for vegetation.
According to the farmers, their vegetables no longer taste like they used to. To remedy this, more fresh water must be pumped from the Nile to the farmland, some with power from solar panels donated by the United Nations.
By 2050, the population of Egypt and Sudan will have doubled and it will be two to three degrees warmer, according to forecasts. By the end of the century, the river is estimated to have lost 70 percent of its flow, according to the UN climate panel IPCC.