Essay on Pollution Threatens Egypt's Water Supply: Challenges & Consequences

Pollution has been blamed for the severe water challenges that face many rural and urban communities both in Egypt and across the world (Zidan & Dawoud, 2013). The water uses in Egypt has always exceeded the available resource since the 1970s. Water quality degradation through pollution has affected the quality of both the surface and the underground water (Di Nunzio, 2013). For instance, the pollution of River Nile has compromised the availability of clean water since a majority of the Egyptian population rely on the water from the river Nile for drinking, municipal use as well as agricultural purposes (Goher, Farhat, Abdo & Salem, 2014).

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Notably, the main contributors to the pollution of the River Nile include wastes from the industries and the municipalities, careless dumping of the dead carcasses, the release of wastewaters into the water sources as well as hazardous chemicals from the industries (El Bedawy, 2014, and Abou-Ali & El-Ayouti, 2014). As such, the wastes from industries result in an increase in heavy metal concentration in the clean water (Mohie El-Din & Moussa, 2016). Due to the pollution of most of the water sources, there is the unavailability of adequate clean water for both the industrial, agricultural as well as domestic consumption (El-Magd, El Kafrawy & Farag, 2014).

The issue of pollution of water sources in Egypt such as the River Nile has been a complex challenge with the government devising stringent policies rules regarding the type and quality of wastewater that is dumped into the river ostensibly to combat the pollution of the Nile River (Abdel-Shafy & Kamel, 2016). The population explosion in Egypt has been blamed by extension to the increased pollution of the water sources (Assar et al., 2020. The most alarming concern is that household wastes significantly cause pollution of the water sources, thus posing a cyclic effect of water shortage to the rural areas in Egypt (Huan, 2016).

References

Abdel-Shafy, H. I., & Kamel, A. H. (2016). Groundwater in Egypt issue: resources, location, amount, contamination, protection, renewal, future overview. Egyptian. J. Chemistry, 59(3), 321-362.

Abou-Ali, H., & El-Ayouti, A. (2014). Nile water pollution and technical efficiency of crop production in Egypt: an assessment using spatial and non-parametric modeling. Environmental and ecological statistics, 21(2), 221-238.

Assar, W., Ibrahim, M. G., Mahmod, W., Allam, A., Tawfik, A., & Yoshimura, C. (2020). Effect of Water Shortage and Pollution of Irrigation Water on Water Reuse for Irrigation in the Nile Delta. Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, 146(2), 05019013.

Di Nunzio, J. (2013). Conflict on the Nile: The future of transboundary water disputes over the world's longest river. Future Directions International Strategic Analysis Paper, Dalkeith.

El Bedawy, R. (2014). Water resources management: alarming crisis for Egypt. J. Mgmt. & Sustainability, 4, 108.

El-Magd, I. A., El Kafrawy, S., & Farag, I. (2014). Detecting oil spill contamination using airborne hyperspectral data in the River Nile, Egypt. Open Journal of Marine Science, 2014.

Goher, M. E., Farhat, H. I., Abdo, M. H., & Salem, S. G. (2014). Metal pollution assessment in the surface sediment of Lake Nasser, Egypt. The Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research, 40(3), 213-224.

Huan, M. (2016, April). The Improving Water Shortage Problem Intervention Plan For Egypt. In International Conference on Education, Management and Computing Technology (ICEMCT-16). Atlantis Press.

Mohie El-Din, M. O., & Moussa, A. M. (2016). Water management in Egypt for facing future challenges. Journal of advanced research, 7(3), 403-412.

Zidan, M. S., & Dawoud, M. A. (2013). Agriculture use of marginal water in Egypt: opportunities and challenges. In Developments in Soil Salinity Assessment and Reclamation (pp. 661-679). Springer, Dordrecht.