Water in Egypt

Egypt is the Nile, plumbed. Around 97% of its fresh water arrives in one river, governed by a 1959 allocation of 55.5 BCM a year, a figure fixed when Egypt had 25 million people. It now has more than 115 million. Per-capita availability, around 500 m³ a year and falling, has crossed the UN threshold for absolute water scarcity.²⁵ Egypt closes the gap the hard way. It recycles agricultural drainage at a scale no other nation attempts, squeezes two crops from every drop, and has begun building desalination for its coastal cities.

Upstream, the era of Egyptian hydro-hegemony has ended. Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam was inaugurated in September 2025 with no binding operating agreement in place. Managing that new reality, hydrologically and diplomatically, is now the central fact of Egyptian water policy.

A quick-reference dashboard for Egypt: headline economy and water indicators⁶⁰⁶¹, water stress against the scarcity thresholds, non-conventional supply, and the institutions behind the sector. The commercial picture, with buyers, deal structures and the project pipeline, is in the market brief.

One interactive map of Egypt's water, built from real geodata. Climate & drought maps the aridity gradient (WorldClim) with warming projections. The WRI Aqueduct layers, covering overall water risk, water stress and flood risk (plus groundwater decline where the trend is significant), shade every river sub-basin by its 0–5 risk score. Demand shows where the population, and the water demand, concentrate. Infrastructure brings the physical system together: rivers, dams (FAO AQUASTAT), treatment plants, desalination and the major conveyors. Hover any sub-basin or marker for detail; sources are cited under each view.

Egypt spans 1,001,450 km², most of it desert, with about 3,500 km of coast on the Mediterranean and Red Sea.¹ The Nile Valley and Delta hold 95% of the population on just 4% of the land.¹ The Delta covers the river’s last 160 km and 250 km of coast.¹ The lowest point, the Qattara Depression in the north-west, lies 133 m below sea level.⁴ In winter the Sinai mountains and several northern coastal cities see frost and snow.¹

Rainfall

Egypt is almost rainless. Long-term precipitation averages 51 mm a year across the country.⁴ Most places receive less than 80 mm. Alexandria gets up to 200 mm, and Cairo just over 10 mm.¹ North Sinai receives about 120 mm.⁴ South of Cairo, years can pass without rain before a sudden downpour sets off flash floods.¹ The rainfall that matters falls upstream. A 1 mm change in Nile basin precipitation shifts runoff at Lake Nasser by roughly 3 billion m³.³ The Blue Nile’s driest ten years on record, 1978–1987, averaged 38.5 billion m³ a year.¹

Heat

Summer temperatures reach 38–43 °C, with extremes of 49 °C in the southern and western deserts.⁴ The Mediterranean coast is cooler, with maximums around 32 °C.⁴ In spring the khamaseen winds push daily highs to about 40 °C, with jumps of up to 20 °C within two hours.¹ Egypt has warmed by 0.53 °C a decade over the past 30 years, the World Bank reports.³ Heat waves and hot days are increasing at all weather stations. Flash floods have become more frequent since 2010.¹

The Delta and the sea

The Delta is the most exposed ground. More than 30% of it lies below 2 m above sea level.² Sea level rose by an average 3.5 mm a year in 1993–2006, and the Abu Qir tide gauge records 6.4 mm a year.¹ The IPCC projects that 1,500–2,600 km² of the Delta could be exposed to flooding by 2100 under 0.75 m of sea-level rise.⁵ Egypt’s adaptation planning works with scenarios of 0.5 m and 1 m by 2100.¹

Projections

Warming of 1.5–3 °C is expected by mid-century, with larger increases inland.³ Egypt could see about 40 more extremely hot days a year by then.³ The Nile is the great unknown. Projections for the Blue Nile range from a 19% fall to a 29% rise in flow.¹ Rainfall variability in the basin could rise by 50% by 2100.³ Across the Mediterranean, the IPCC expects rainfall to fall by 4–22% by the end of the century, depending on emissions.⁵

Rainfall and temperature in numbers

Averaged over the whole of Egypt, ERA5 reanalysis gives about 12 mm of rain a year and a mean temperature of 23.0 °C for 1991–2020. About 55% of that rain falls in January, February and March, and no month averages as much as 5 mm. Since 1971 the country has warmed by about 0.40 °C a decade. At such low totals, percentage changes in rainfall between decades mean little in absolute terms.

Projected change

Source: World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, retrieved September 2026. ERA5 0.25° reanalysis for the annual series (1950–2022) and the monthly climatology (1991–2020); CMIP6 0.25° multi-model ensemble median for the projections, as change against 1995–2014. These are national averages, which hide the gap between wet highlands and dry interiors, and reanalysis rainfall over deserts carries wide uncertainty.

One river, counted twice

Egypt’s water budget starts with the Nile’s 55.5 billion m³ and stretches it through reuse. Drainage water is captured and pumped back into canals, about 9.7 billion m³ a year in the Delta on one study’s estimate.⁴⁰ Treated municipal wastewater increasingly joins it. Renewable groundwater in the Delta and valley is largely Nile seepage, the same water counted again. The Western Desert taps the non-renewable Nubian Sandstone for oasis agriculture.

The reuse machine

Nowhere else recycles like Egypt. The Bahr El-Baqar (5.6 million m³/day) and New Delta/Hammam (7.5 million m³/day) plants are the largest treatment works on earth, built to reclaim drainage for new desert farmland. Guinness World Records certifies the New Delta plant as the largest water treatment facility anywhere.²⁸ Desalination remains small but is planned to grow sharply under a 2050 programme for the coastal governorates. Capacity is to rise from roughly 1.4 million m³/day today to a target of 8.85 million m³/day, with a first phase procured as renewable-powered PPPs.²⁶

The main rivers

The table ranks the rivers of Egypt by the largest natural flow they reach inside the country. Natural flow is the modelled long-term average before any withdrawals. For a heavily used river it measures what the river could carry, not what arrives today.

Sources: Grill, Lehner, Thieme et al. (2019), Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers, Nature 569, dataset under CC BY 4.0, for length, natural flow (WaterGAP, 1971–2000) and free-flowing status, meaning the share of the river’s length inside Egypt still classed as free-flowing. No flow figure is given below 20 m³/s, where a global model is too coarse to rank small rivers. Dams from the FAO AQUASTAT regional inventories, matched to the nearest river reach, so a dam on a tributary close to a main stem can be counted against the main stem. The same rivers are drawn on the water map above under Rivers & lakes.

Egypt’s share of the Nile is fixed at 55.5 billion m³ a year. The government puts its needs at about 90 billion.²⁹ In 2018 officials counted about 60 billion m³ available in total: the Nile share plus just under 5 billion from non-renewable desert groundwater. Agriculture used 84% of it.³⁰ President Sisi said in October 2024 that the Nile supplies more than 98% of the country’s water.³²

Capping rice

In April 2018 parliament amended the 1966 agriculture law. The government can now ban water-intensive crops in some areas, with fines and prison terms for violators.³⁰ The rice area was cut to 724,200 feddans, a change expected to save 3 billion m³ of water.³⁰ Farmers had planted about 1.8 million feddans the year before, far above the official allotment.³⁴ Days later the government allowed a further 100,000 feddans for the season, to be irrigated with drainage water.³¹

Farming the desert

At the same time Egypt is pushing irrigation into the desert. The Toshka project, launched in 1997, was revived in July 2020 by 162 national companies. It uses centre-pivot irrigation.³⁵ By late 2023 it had 300,000 acres under wheat.³⁵ The New Delta scheme targets a million feddans.³⁶ Its water comes from agricultural drainage, treated at a plant with a capacity of 7.5 million m³ a day.³⁷ By August 2026 its conveyance system was 79% complete. It has 13 pumping stations and 174 km of channels to serve about 362,000 feddans.³⁸

The 1.5 Million Feddan Project, first stage of a four-million-feddan plan, draws non-renewable groundwater from depths of up to 1,500 m through more than 5,000 wells. A 2026 review found that it went ahead without feasibility studies, with planning and implementation running side by side.³⁹

Counting every drop twice

Reuse closes part of the gap. In the Nile Delta about 9.7 billion m³ of agricultural drainage water and 2.9 billion m³ of treated domestic wastewater are reused, one study reports.⁴⁰ The Bahr El-Baqar plant, inaugurated in September 2021, treats more than 2 billion m³ a year for farmland in Sinai.⁴¹ By August 2026 its two conveyance routes were about 89% complete. They have 18 pumping stations to serve about 456,000 feddans.³⁸

Withdrawals over time

FAO’s AQUASTAT estimates put Egypt’s freshwater withdrawals at 48.2 billion m³ in 1975 and 77.5 billion m³ in 2022. Agriculture’s share of the total moved from 86% in 1994 to 79% in 2022.

Source: FAO AQUASTAT via the World Bank World Development Indicators, retrieved September 2026. AQUASTAT revises national figures irregularly and fills the years between surveys, so a jump between two adjacent years usually marks a new national estimate rather than a change on the ground.

The system’s anchor remains the Aswan High Dam and Lake Nasser, with a gross capacity of 162 billion m³ on the FAO AQUASTAT dam inventory this page’s own table uses.⁴³ Downstream, a chain of control works is more than a century old. It includes the Old Aswan dam and Asyut (both 1902, the Aswan dam heightened again to 1933), Esna (1908) and Nag Hammadi (1930), and the Delta barrages of 1840.⁴ Hydropower from the Aswan dams and the Esna and Nag Hammadi barrages supplies about 3% of Egypt’s energy production.¹

Canals, drains and pumps

About 40,000 km of canals branch from the Nile.⁴ In the New Lands, cascades of pumping stations lift water up to 50 m from the main canals to the fields.⁴ Drainage became a national programme only from 1970, and 99 pumping stations now handle drainage effluent.⁴ The Al Salam Canal mixes drainage water with Nile water at a ratio of 1:1.⁴

Lining the canals

Canal lining is the flagship efficiency programme. Launched in 2020, it set out to line 20,000 km of the 55,000 km of canals fed by the Nile.⁸ The ministry estimated the saving in seepage losses at 5 billion m³ a year.⁸ A first phase of 7,000 km was costed at EGP 18 billion.⁹ By mid-2022 the whole programme was put at EGP 80 billion, for completion by mid-2024.¹¹

Progress figures depend on the source and the date. The ministry reported 831 km by January 2021, at a cost of EGP 3 billion, and 3,134 km by November 2021.⁷¹⁰ In June 2022 it reported 5,242 km.¹¹ The World Bank, citing ministry figures of July 2022, gave 4,447 km completed and 4,185 km under way.³ In July 2024 the minister told a parliamentary committee that 7,700 km had been rehabilitated, with 2,000 km more to complete.¹² He cited the same 7,700 km in June 2026.¹³ The 2025/26 national plan budgets canal rehabilitation and lining over 600 km.¹⁴

The approach has since narrowed. In January 2023 the minister called lining one means of rehabilitation, not a goal, and said concrete need not be used where suitable alternatives exist. Some canals were to be relined at the contractor’s expense.¹⁵ Members of parliament had filed nearly 50 briefing requests on the project’s negative effects and on work delivered below specification.¹⁶ A former irrigation minister called the 5 billion m³ saving exaggerated. He put seepage losses from the Nile and all canals at about 8 billion m³ a year.¹⁶

Groundwater carries the other cost. A 2026 model of Gharbia governorate found that canal seepage supplies about 20% of recharge to the shallow aquifer. Lining all its canals cut that seepage by about 96%.¹⁷ Field monitoring and modelling in Qalyubia and Sharqia projected a 3.5 m fall in groundwater levels if the whole canal network were lined.¹⁸ An earlier Delta model still judged lining the most suitable option for managing water in the region.¹⁹

Desalination

Desalination has grown quickly from a small base. Capacity rose from 140,000 m³ a day in 2014 to 750,000 m³ a day in 2021, across 76 plants.³ By April 2026, 129 plants produced 1.411 million m³ a day, and 19 more were under construction.²⁰ The Galala plant on the Red Sea, at about 150,000 m³ a day, is among the newest.¹ Targets conflict. The national communication cites about 1.5 million m³ a day by 2030, while the NDC names 4 million.¹² For 2050 the national strategy aims at about 9 million m³ a day, built in successive five-year plans.²¹ In May 2023 the Sovereign Fund of Egypt prequalified 17 consortia for the first renewable-powered phase.²²

Wastewater

In 2012 Egypt produced 7,078 million m³ of municipal wastewater, collected 92% of it and treated 57%.⁴ Coverage has since widened but stays uneven. The national communication counts 409 municipal treatment plants serving 59.7% of the population, 90% in urban areas but 12% in rural ones.¹ In 2015 only 6% of villages had wastewater treatment.⁶ The National Rural Sanitation Program aims to cover all rural villages, home to more than 45 million people.⁶ Bahr El-Baqar treats 5.6 million m³ a day.³ Plans to 2030 add 215 drinking-water treatment plants with 4.365 million m³ a day of capacity.¹

The asset base in numbers

Sources: FAO AQUASTAT regional dam inventories (CC BY 4.0), which list large dams with a published capacity and can lag recent construction; the MENA Water Review major projects register, where each record cites its source on the project page. The database follows large contracted projects, not the whole asset base.

The delta’s drains carry the country’s wastes. The main pollution sources are untreated industrial effluent, municipal sewage, and fertiliser and pesticide runoff.⁴² The 106 km Bahr El-Baqar drain, built in 1914, is among the most polluted drainage systems in Egypt.⁴¹ The High Dam changed the river as well. Fertilisers have not replaced the 40 million tonnes of silt the flood once deposited, and reduced flow has let seawater into the delta, salinising its soils.⁴³

Lake Manzala

The drains end in the coastal lakes. Lake Manzala receives about 7,500 MCM a year, more than 95% of its inflow, from six main drains carrying mostly untreated water.⁴⁴ Its area shrank from about 1,709 km² in 1990 to about 572 km² in 2020.⁴⁴ Egypt launched a national lake restoration programme in 2017 with Manzala as its priority, and dredging began that year.⁴⁴⁴⁵ Sampling recorded dissolved oxygen as low as 0.39 mg/L in the southern sector.⁴⁵ Monitoring in 2021–22 found the lake still hypereutrophic, with high lead, cadmium, nickel and chromium. Its authors judged the chemical restoration incomplete.⁴⁴

Treatment capacity is growing. In 2021 more than 480 treatment plants had a combined capacity of about 2 billion m³ a year, with 150 more under construction.³⁹

The reported indicators

Sources: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme via the World Bank; SDG 6.3.1 and 6.3.2 from the UN Statistics Division SDG database, retrieved September 2026. Safely managed means an improved source on the premises, available when needed and free from priority contamination. SDG 6.3.2 rests on each country’s own monitoring network, so a high share can mean few water bodies were assessed, and values move when methods change between reporting rounds.

The colonial agreements

On 7 May 1929 Egypt and Britain exchanged notes on the Nile. Sudan could take no more than 126 m³/s before 1936. No works that reduced Egypt’s water or changed its timing could be built in Sudan or British-administered territory without Egypt’s consent.⁴⁶ The 1959 agreement with Sudan, signed on 8 November, set acquired rights at 48 billion m³ for Egypt and 4 billion for Sudan.⁴⁷ Egypt would build the High Dam. Its extra yield would be split 7.5 billion to Egypt and 14.5 billion to Sudan, for totals of 55.5 and 18.5 billion m³. Egypt paid Sudan £E15 million in compensation, and the two created a Permanent Joint Technical Commission.⁴⁷ The High Dam was completed in 1970.⁴³ Egypt holds that the colonial-era treaties give it a right to veto upstream projects.⁴⁸

The upstream challenge

The Nile Basin Initiative formed in February 1999 and now counts ten members.⁴⁹⁵⁰ Negotiations on a Cooperative Framework Agreement cleared every point by 2007 except Article 14 on water security. Egypt and Sudan wanted their existing uses recognised, which upstream states rejected.⁵⁰⁵¹ On 14 May 2010 Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda signed the agreement in Entebbe, followed by Kenya and Burundi.⁵⁰ It entered into force on 13 October 2024 with six parties. Egypt and Sudan declared it not binding on them.⁵² Egypt’s irrigation minister said the country would not concede a single cubic metre of Nile water.³³

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia laid the dam’s foundation stone in 2011. In 2013 an international panel of experts recommended a joint transboundary impact assessment.⁴⁹ On 23 March 2015 the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed a Declaration of Principles in Khartoum, including a commitment to cause no significant harm.⁵³⁴⁹ Talks deadlocked in November 2017. In August 2019 Egypt proposed filling over seven years with a minimum annual release of 40 billion m³, which Ethiopia rejected.⁴⁹ In February 2020 Egypt initialled a US-brokered draft, but Ethiopia skipped the signing.⁴⁹

Ethiopia filled the reservoir anyway. The first filling, in July 2020, stored 4.9 billion m³, despite Egypt’s insistence on a binding agreement first.⁵⁴ In September 2021 the Security Council called for a binding agreement in a presidential statement.⁴⁹ Ethiopia announced the fourth filling in September 2023, which Egypt called illegal, and Cairo ended negotiations that December.⁵⁵⁴⁹ After the fifth filling in September 2024, Egypt told the Council it reserved the right to take all measures under international law.⁴⁹

The dam was inaugurated on 9 September 2025, and Egypt and Sudan declined to attend. Its reservoir is designed to hold 74 billion m³.⁴⁹²⁹ Within weeks Egypt accused Ethiopia of causing a “man-made flood” through uncoordinated releases. It raised outflows from the High Dam and warned of flooding in Menoufia and Beheira.⁵⁶ In January 2026 President Trump offered to restart US mediation, which Sisi welcomed.⁴⁹ In August 2026 the irrigation minister said Egypt would not allow new Ethiopian dams on the Nile.⁵⁷

The record

Shared river basins

The register also places small areas of Egypt in the Jordan basin, too little to carry here.

Cooperation and conflict on the record, 1948 to 2008

The International Water Events Database scores every reported interaction between riparian states on the Basins at Risk scale, from formal war over water to voluntary unification. Cooperative and conflictive events add up to less than 100% because neutral events are counted too.

Source: Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, International Water Events Database, Oregon State University, as compiled by the Transboundary Waters Atlas. The series ends in 2008; every later dispute and agreement is outside it and is covered in the text above.

The agreements

Source: Master Treaties Database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (February 2023 edition), via the Transboundary Waters Atlas. Titles as recorded, with spelling normalised. Colonial-era boundary instruments appear because they fixed water rights on rivers that later became international.

Joint bodies

• Nile Basin Initiative (NBIX)Nile · 2002 · Burundi, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda
• Permanent Joint Technical Commission on the Nile (NJTC)Nile · 1959 · Egypt, Sudan

Source: the river basin organisation database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (2013). A joint body on paper is not evidence that it meets.

Shared aquifers

• Coastal Aquifer BasinIsrael, State of Palestine · data good
• Nubian Sandstone Aquifer SystemChad, Libya, Sudan · data good
• Sinai–Negev BasinIsrael · data moderate

Source: IGRAC and UNESCO, Transboundary Aquifers of the World. Data reliability is IGRAC’s own assessment of the information behind each outline.

Egypt has run irrigation from the centre since a public works department was set up in 1836. After several renamings it became the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in 1999.⁴ Its affiliates include the authority that operates the High Dam and the Aswan Dam.⁴ From 2009, 8 general directorates and 45 Integrated Water Management Districts replaced the old inspectorates.⁴

Drinking water and sanitation follow a separate line. A 2004 road map consolidated most service providers under the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater.⁶ A separate utilities ministry was created in 2012, taking over from the Ministry of Housing.⁴ The regulator, EWRA, was still gaining autonomy in 2015.⁶ The National Council for Climate Change, created in 2015, has been chaired by the Prime Minister since 2019.¹

Laws and plans

Law No. 12 of 1984 set the legal basis for irrigation and drainage. Law No. 213 of 1994 added farmer participation through water user associations.⁴ Law No. 48 of 1982 protects the Nile from pollution.⁴ A new water resources and irrigation law followed, which the World Bank dates to 2020.³ Planning runs through the National Water Resources Plan to 2037 and the ministry’s strategy to 2050.³¹ The National Climate Change Strategy 2050 was launched at COP26, and the NDC was updated on 25 June 2023.¹

Prices

Water is cheap and utilities lose money. In 2015 Cairo’s tariffs were among the lowest in the world, and sewerage was charged at 25% of the water bill.⁶ In 2012 the holding company was losing LE18 million a day, the minister said.²³ In 2018 drinking-water prices rose by up to 46.5%, and the first block went from 45 to 65 piastres per m³.²⁴ The World Bank still describes the sector as highly subsidised.³

Egypt’s arithmetic is unforgiving. Its Nile share is fixed, and the government puts its needs at about 90 billion m³ a year.²⁹ A fall in High Dam inflow from 55 to 45 billion m³ could cut irrigated land by 22%, the World Bank estimates.³ Nile flow projections run in both directions, so planning has to cover floods as well as long droughts.¹ On the coast, much of the Delta sits within 2 m of a rising sea.²

The strategy is to recycle, line the canals and desalinate the coast. Each step raises a cost question. Desalination targets for 2030 differ by a factor of almost three, and the sector remains highly subsidised.¹²³ Upstream, the next long drought will test operations at Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam.