Egypt’s Nile Delta and its coastal front on the Mediterranean are considered vulnerable to shoreline changes due to erosion and accretion, subsidence and sea level rise due to climate change. Heavy rains often result in flash floods in Egypt. Rain-induced floods wash away property, claim lives and displace people. Dust storms are also common in Egypt, frequently spanning hundreds of kilometers.
This section provides a summary of key natural hazards and their associated socioeconomic impacts in a given country. And it allows quick evaluation of most vulnerable areas through the spatial comparison of natural hazard data with development data, thereby identifying exposed livelihoods and natural systems.
The charts provide overview of the most frequent natural disaster in a given country and understand the impacts of those disasters on human populations.
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Climate change is now recognized to have a significant impact on disaster management efforts and pose a significant threat to the efforts to meet the growing needs of the most vulnerable populations. The demands of disaster risk management are such that concise, clear, and reliable information is crucial. The information presented here offers insight into the frequency, impact and occurrence of natural hazards. Source (PDF)
Understanding natural hazard occurrence as well as historical climate conditions, in relation to development contexts, is critical to understanding a country’s historical vulnerability. This tool allows the visualization of different natural hazards or historical climate conditions with socio-economic and development datasets. Select the Development Context and either a Natural Hazard or Climate Condition and overlay horizontally by sliding the toggle left or right to gain a broader sense of historically vulnerable areas.
Data presented under Historical Climate Conditions are reanalysis products derived from ERA5-Land data. ERA5-Land is a global land-surface dataset at 9 km resolution, consistent with atmospheric data from the ERA5 reanalysis from 1950 onward. Climate reanalyses combine past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables. They provide a comprehensive description of the observed climate as it has evolved during recent decades, on 3D grids at sub-daily intervals.
This data has been collected, aggregated and processed by the Climate Resilience Cluster of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EO4SD) initiative.
- Heavy rains often result in flash floods in Egypt. Rain-induced floods wash away property, claim lives and displace people.
- An increase in the maximum amount of rainfall in any 5-day period (a surrogate for an extreme storm event) is projected to increase and the maximum period between rainy days is expected to decrease, which will inevitably result in greater flooding and storm damage.
- While sandstorm occurrences have decreased since the 1960’s, climate change is likely to increase the frequency of sand and dust storms. The Khamsin weather that causes dust storms is associated with a desert depression following extreme temperature rises, and causes loss of top soil and often results in respiratory complications.
More information on natural hazards can be found at ThinkHazard.
- Saline sea water will penetrate far into the northern delta, turning the current lakes into shallow saline lagoons and bays.
- Inundation along coastal areas due to sea level rise leading to destruction of property and disruption of the proper functioning of infrastructure facilities directly exposed to the sea.
- Substantial reduction in agricultural productivity.