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The GERD Strife: Antagonistic Relationship Among Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt
Abstract
The aim of this article is to scrutinize the ramifications of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on Egypt and Sudan. By setting forth the causes and repercussions, the article is bestowing the tactics to the friction. What is more, the article is dissects under the lens of Functionalism theory by David Mitrany, practiced in Liberalism under the sub category of Institutionalism. The study has been carried out by both qualitative and quantitative research methods, by using scholarly articles of well-known pioneers and reports from the authentic journals. In addition to that, the theory advocates that cooperation on one conflict, between the countries, open up multiple incentives to cooperate on other issues between the same countries as well. By following the findings and below mentioned results of cooperation, countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt can overcome on the multiple scarcities and disparities that are arising due to GERD dam construction.
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Optimizing hydropower generation from the Nile upstream mega-dams during prolonged droughts while minimizing the downstream water deficit is the cornerstone in resolving the ongoing major water conflict in the Eastern Nile River Basin. A decade of negotiation and mediation has been unsuccessful, mainly due to the hydraulic uncertainties associated with operating the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam during prolonged droughts. Based on the negotiation outcomes, we provide comprehensive assessments of the efficiency of multiple drought-mitigation policies for the impact of dam operation. Our results suggest it can generate almost optimal hydropower without a noticeable downstream deficit during wet, average, and temporary drought flow conditions. For prolonged drought, we identify an ideal operation policy allowing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to generate a sustainable energy of 87% of its optimal hydropower without generating additional downstream water deficit. Furthermore, we provide four intermediate policies demonstrating enhanced upstream hydropower generation while minimizing dam-induced downstream water deficits. Our findings attempt to bridge the negotiation disparities in the Nile hydropower mega-dams operations during prolonged drought and foster an actionable and collaborative framework.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile is expected to influence many ecosystem services, such as flood regulation, hydro-electricity production, food supply, and habitat provision, among others. Understanding these impacts (positive and negative) requires a comprehensive evaluation framework. This study develops and applies an integrated simulation framework for assessing the impacts of the GERD on Sudan, focusing on the simultaneous economywide effects of riverine flood hazards, irrigation water supply, hydropower generation, and floodplain-dependent industries, namely traditional fired clay brick production. The simulation framework incorporates three models: a river infrastructure system model, a flood model, and a Computable General Equilibrium Model. Results indicate positive impacts for hydropower generation and flood control, marginal benefits for water supply to existing irrigation, and negative consequences for brick production and the construction sector. Assuming that the GERD starts its long-term operation in 2025, we find an overall positive economic impact on Sudan’s Gross Domestic Product in 2025, with an increase of up to just over 0.1%, subject to river flow conditions. Recognizing the differences in impacts across sectors and income groups, the study emphasizes the need for interventions that ameliorate negative effects. While the study captures several impacts, other effects on the environment, recession agriculture, and soil fertility require further investigation. Still, our findings underscore the importance of adopting an integrated simulation approach to dam evaluation, acknowledging the interconnected nature of water and related sectors in national economies.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile River has become a focal point in the fields of water diplomacy, economics, and environmental considerations in the Nile Basin. Announced during the Arab Spring in 2011, the GERD aims to address Ethiopia’s significant energy shortfall and foster regional economic growth by potentially doubling the country’s electricity output. However, this ambition has heightened tensions with downstream countries, especially Egypt and Sudan, which rely heavily on the Nile for their water needs. This paper examines the ongoing conflict surrounding the GERD, focusing on the deadlock situation despite considerable scholarly attention to its economic, political, and environmental dimensions. The analysis presented in this paper reveals the roots of contention by analyzing past treaties and the present negotiation status, illustrating the complex interplay between development goals, environmental sustainability, and regional water security. The paper advocates for a revised legal framework that moves beyond past agreements towards a more inclusive, cooperative management strategy for the Nile’s waters. It proposes the development of a new treaty between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan, grounded in their 2015 Declaration of Principles agreement and inspired by successful international dispute resolutions. It also discusses the potential of neutral third-party interventions to facilitate unbiased negotiations grounded in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution, emphasizing the importance of equitable and sustainable water governance. In essence, this research calls for a collaborative approach to resolve the GERD conflict, emphasizing the need for agreements that harmonize developmental ambitions with the water security of the Nile Basin nations. .
The construction of Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam is a fait accompli. By 2022, around 90 per cent of its construction had been completed, but only two of the 13 turbines were producing electricity, and so uncertainty remains over the dam’s impact on the Nile’s downstream countries. After protracted negotiations between Ethiopia, where the waters originate, and Egypt and Sudan, the two states most heavily dependent on Nile waters, the result is diplomatic stalemate. The intractable problem is not so much the dam but rather the 1902 and 1929 treaties between Great Britain and its then Egyptian and Sudanese colonies over the utilisation of the Nile waters. While Ethiopia was not a British colony, it was a party to the 1902 Treaty, but has always interpreted the water-sharing arrangements as inequitable. The problem’s resolution is now fiendishly complex. Impoverished Ethiopia has unilaterally proceeded with a hugely expensive dam, and the contemporary danger is that with diplomatic efforts seemingly exhausted, the military option becomes a distinct possibility. The question is whether Egypt’s military posturing is real-politik or simply rhetoric.
Dams are built for different purposes, but failure of a dam could result in extreme disasters such as floods. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) was mainly built for power generation, but concerns about its safety, location and site conditions have led the downstream countries to investigate the GERD’s stability. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the failure of the dam on the downstream countries using the Hydrologic Engineering Center River Analysis System (HEC-RAS). Outflow hydrographs and flood inundation maps were provided through a hypothetical dam break scenario. An unsteady flow hydrodynamic routing with a 2D model was used to simulate the failure of the dam. A sensitivity analysis study of the output’s findings against breach parameters was also performed. The breach outflow discharge increases as the breach dimension increases. However, the peak discharge decreases with increasing breach formation time. Moreover, to prepare emergency action plans, it is important to predict the inundation depth, levels, arrival of flood waves, flood coverage area and water velocity. Furthermore, the results showed that Khartoum would turn into lakes within about 10 days and flood water depth would exceed 11 m at some locations in residential areas. Moreover, the flood waves overtopped the Roseires, Sennar and Merowe dams by 11, 7 and 20 m, respectively. In addition, the level of Lake Nasser would reach 188 m above sea level and the Aswan High Dam might be in great danger.
This paper attempts to show how the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) 's economic and political gains could help develop a shared outlook to regulate Ethiopia's opposing political trajectories, i.e., the ethnocentric and pan-Ethiopian nationalist camps. Presently, different ethnic-based "in-group and out-group" contrasting political discourses have dominated Ethiopian polity. The paper reviews and exposes relevant philosophical concepts, including "mirror identity",pri-mordial and instrumental conception of ethnicity. Notably, following Anderson's (2006) line of thought, nationalism as a "cultural artefact" and expression of an "imagined community",the paper argues that GERD could serve as a shared symbolic and developmental language to re-shape Ethiopian nationalconsciousness and imagination by improving the political and economic domains of the country. Accordingly, the GERD covertly or overtly helps reform the polity's self-recognition mechanisms and circuitously re-approaches outstanding political differences by in-spiring trust-based relations among major political actors. Ethnocentric motivations raise political questions such as secession, the right to linguistic and cultural recognition, economic equality, and political security and representation by using their respective ethnic lines as means of politi-cal mobilization. In current Ethiopia, political identities have been practically blended with ethnic identity. In this sense, as diverse ethnic groups exist, political borders sustain among the multiple ethnic-based nationalists and between pan-Ethiopian and ethnocentric actors. Thus, a compre-hensive dialogue and constructive political cross-fertilization are required between various politi-cal actors, horizontally and vertically, among ethnocentric nationalists and the pan-Ethiopian ad-vocates. In Ethiopia, the realization of internal political consensus requires an instantaneous re-medial mechanism. Accordingly, the politically drawn antithetical ethnic demarcations and occa-sionally fabricated historical narratives have undeniably pushed politics into unfavourable condi-tions. That is why, as the paper maintains that developmental projects such as the GERD would have pertinent economic and political mechanisms to developing a national sentiment, which in turn symbolically facilitate national consensus among the major political actors. Hence, borrowing Fukuyama's (2018) notion of "creedal national identity", one could resonate those developmental projects can help realize symbolic worth by constructively enabling citizens to recognize their countries' foundational ideals and elevating common factors. In terms of scope, the present paper does not examine the GERD project's external geopolitical and legal concerns,although these topics are worth examining for further investigations.Key word: Ethnicity, Ethiopia, Ethnic federalism, GERD, Developmental Language, Identity Politics.
Since that the impact of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on Egypt is still a controversial issue, this report quantifies major effects of GERD on High Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser in Egypt under different filling and operation scenarios. Before discussing the impacts, the first section of the report gives a general technical overview and a brief background on the GERD project in Ethiopia. In section two, modelling results of the Blue Nile catchment are presented showing the impact of the GERD on Blue Nile river discharge and Lake Nasser storage on both the short and the long run. Then in section three, the hydrological study was carried over to estimate the maximum flow event that can reach upstream the dam, this study included carrying out frequency analysis for annual maximum daily flows, some empirical equations such as Creager and Myers, and obtaining the effective run-off hydrograph using NRCS method along with the SCS rainfall hydrograph and convolution methods. PMF was then estimated to be around 38,500 m3/s under natural conditions ending up for 21,300 m3/s after reservoir routing. Afterwards, preliminary hydraulic design of the flip bucket gate with its plunge pool was carried out in section four, along with the saddle dam design with the cross sections of both structures designed and detailed. At the last section of the report, the EIA statement of the project was presented, showing that the project is a category “A” project which means it requires a full EIA, where afterwards proposed mitigations were proposed to minimize any identified adverse impacts and enhance positive impacts of the GERD project. Finally, a summary was presented with the study results giving indications on the impact of GERD project on HAD according to the point of view of the researchers.
The GERD project is a game-changer in the hydro-politics of the region. The hydro-hegemony of the Nile river were solely controlled by Egypt for millennials. The colonial era agreements and the strategic allies with USA and other superpower countries were advantage for Egypt to exclusively use the Nile river without a strong push from upstream countries. However, the political dynamics in the region, the launch of GERD project, internal instability in Egypt and other contributing factors are changing the hydro-hegemony of the Nile river from control to cooperation. These dynamic changes are forcing Egypt’s foreign policy from war mongering to negotiations and cooperation.
For centuries and emboldened by colonial treaties, Egypt has enjoyed overwhelming hydro-hegemony in the (NBR) Nile Basin River region. However, Egyptian dominance over the NBR has been challenged by Ethiopia following her unilateral construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Using A qualitative, deductive approach based on multiple sources of evidence, this paper analyses the historical imbalance in the Nile colonial treaties that gave Egypt monopoly over the waters of the NBR. The article also describes various human security threats in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, where the dam project is located and the geopolitical implications of this development against the backdrop of climate change and the coming of new actors and donors such as China, including the leasing of land to corporations and countries such as India, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. We recommend collaborative and holistic management instead of the dominant state-centric water development approach in this international waterway. The development of sustainable cooperation over this shared waterway will help meet climate change challenges and mitigate the contemporary conflict between Ethiopia and Egypt, including other countries within the region.
The phenomenon of conflict, within the international relations framework, has a set of intellectual theses that may contribute to the interpretation of the external behavior of states, within the priorities of national and international institutions in conflict resolution. Trying to simulate these theses is done to solve the conflict with the least possible losses. Therefore, we must understand the stage of severity of which this crisis has reached to tackle realities realistically, especially in the pre-armed conflict phases. In these earlier phases, the conflict management is broader particularly in adapting issues to pressures while retaining the ability to choose between alternatives that are available to each side involved directly or indirectly.
In recent decades, access to energy resources has become the most important form and cause of conflicts and wars and, in the future, conflicts will be about the world’s most expensive natural resource, water. Water is a strategic necessity for all people as it is the basis of life on Earth. It is associated with socio-economic development as well as food and energy production and is at the heart of climate change adaptation. Water has also become a rights issue as the world’s population increases. With the need to create a balance between community requirements and the available resources, the challenges involved in the following years will be even more pressing. While water covers 72% of the earth’s surface, all freshwater represents only 2.8% of the overall volume. Of this 2.45% of the freshwater is represented as ice-shaped and groundwater. Thus, humans have only 0.35% of the world’s total water supply1. And according to FAO* this will be reduced during the coming years due to climate change. In return, 17 countries in the world suffer from a severe shortage of water resources, 12 of them are located in the Middle East and North Africa2. Hence the importance of establishing the GERD subject, the main cause of the conflict over the Nile waters between Egypt and Ethiopia, because Egypt is coming to a real problem that will affect its water security and its existence as a state. To understand it and the impacts on Egypt’s water security, we must go back in history.
https://orsam.org.tr/en/the-gerd-conflict-challenges-to-egypts-water-security/
Egypt is facing many challenging since the year 2011. At the top of these challenges, the freshwater scarcity at the same of the increasing demand of freshwater for the rapid growth of populations and consequently the increasing demand for food. The construction of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) imposed additional challenges to Egypt due to the expected harm to all sectors in Egypt particularly the agricultural sector which consumes about 80–85% of the freshwater. Therefore, this chapter introduces the basic information GERD and AHD. Also, the major environmental impacts and benefits of GERD compared to Aswan High Dam (AHD) are presented as an introduction to this unique volume about GERD and AHD in the series titled “Handbook of Environmental Chemistry.”
The following paper examines the Nile question from an Egyptian perspective. The Nile is Egypts main source of water, and 96% of this water originates from outside of its territory. This explains why water is a key security issue for Egypt, and why, from Egypts point of view, cooperation with the upstream Nile countries is the only way forward. Egypts water policy focuses on demand management, environmental protection and international joint projects to increase the water supply (e.g. Jonglei canal).
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is the largest hydroelectric power project in Africa in terms of installed capacity. With global attention focused on the impact of this megadam, questions about how GERD‐related conflict developed are coming to the fore. This discussion paper describes policy conflict around this new hydroelectric dam over the past decade among three nations in the Nile River basin—Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Relying on the insights from the Policy Conflict Framework (a policy process theory that clarifies policy conflict characteristics and episodes) and the method of document analysis, this paper reviews the policy setting around the GERD conflict at the macro level. The paper concludes by proposing three recommendations to mitigate policy conflict: (1) address hydrologic information loopholes, (2) leverage a new mediator, and (3) recognize the multifaceted nature of policy conflict.
Egypt, which suffers from water scarcity, has been listed among the ten top countries that are threatened due to the rapidly increasing population. With growing concerns about climate change and possible impacts on water shortage, human intrusion and development processes have had undeniable adverse impacts on maintaining healthy lakes. Aswan High Dam (AHD) Lake is considered a source of water to minimize the water scarcity problem. Lake Nasser is facing many challenges. One of these challenges is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). GERD is now under construction on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia. The question still to answer is “will the GERD affect Lake Nasser?” This chapter focuses on two objectives: first is to evaluate the land resources of Lake Nasser and second is to study the impact of GERD on AHD Lake. The challenges facing the sustainable development of AHD lake and their solutions are identified and discussed.
Home to more than 160 million people, the Nile River Basin has become one of the hotspots of the global quest for food, water and energy security. Moving closer to its completion, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) highlights the interplay between the food, water, and energy sectors and their implications on geopolitical power relations in the region. Despite Ethiopia having the highest volumetric contribution to the Nile river flow, Egypt has maintained hydro-hegemony over the basin for several decades on the basis of historical claims and colonial agreements. Egypt has stated that its volumetric share of the Nile’s water is not sufficient to sustain its growing population, declaring water availability a matter of national security. However, for Ethiopia, the GERD represents a crucial moment in its development agenda, acting as both a counterhegemonic power play, as well as a means to improving the hydropower capacity of the country, and ensuring future food security. This paper explores the various hegemonic and counter-hegemonic strategies employed by Egypt and Ethiopia respectively, highlighting the various ways in which food, water, and energy concerns are intrinsic components of the asymmetric power configurations of the Nile River Basin. By navigating the debate surrounding the GERD, this paper highlights the necessity of incorporating the food, water, and energy nexus into studies of hydro-hegemony and counter-hegemony. This allows the future policy direction for nexus management and governance in the Nile River Basin to move beyond benefit sharing, instead steering towards power sharing.
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