High uncertainty exists in the projected climate change impacts on the Nile’s economies and water-dependent sectors. Under these uncertainties, managing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam cooperatively and adaptively can produce economic and water management benefits for Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.
Messages for policy
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There are deep uncertainties around the impacts of climate change on the Nile streamflow, reservoir evaporation rates, crop evapotranspiration and socio-economic development.
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Adaptive management plans involve short-term actions and adaptation mechanisms as climate change unfolds; using such plans to manage Nile infrastructure helps better cope with climate change uncertainty.
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On average, and especially with extreme wet or dry projections, cooperative adaptive management of the GERD provides economy-wide and water management benefits to Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt compared with the Washington draft proposal.
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Adaptive management plans of the GERD aiming to maximize the economic gains of only one country result in losses for at least one of the other two countries compared with the Washington draft proposal; however, several compromise adaptive operating rulesets exist that improve performance for all three countries.
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Further reading
Basheer, M. et al. Collaborative management of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam increases economic benefits and resilience. Nat. Commun. 12, 5622 (2021). This study describes the integrated economy-wide and river system simulation used to model the interlinkages between the Nile River system and the economies of Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.
Basheer, M. et al. Balancing national economic policy outcomes for sustainable development. Nat. Commun. 13, 5041 (2022). This article connects economy-wide simulation with artificial intelligence search and machine learning. This shows that the multi-objective design approach used in the present study is general; it can be used in a wide range of contexts to find efficient policies and the trade-offs and synergies they imply.
O’Neill, B. C. et al. The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6. Geosci. Model Dev. 9, 3461–3482 (2016). This paper describes the climate change scenarios of the CMIP6, from which some scenarios have been bias-corrected, downscaled and then used in simulating the impacts of climate change on the Nile Basin and its riparian economies. More scenarios were synthesized to address the ‘East African climate paradox’.
Marchau, V. A. W. J., Walker, W. E., Bloemen, P. J. T. M. & Popper, S. W. Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice (Springer Nature, 2019). This book provides a review of methods for decision-making under deep uncertainty (such as climate change), which motivated the adaptive management formulation used for the GERD in our study.
Edrees, M. Letter dated 11 June 2021 from the Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-Genera (United Nations, 2021); https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3931750?ln=en. This document is a letter from the Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations to the President of the United Nations Security Council, in which the Washington draft proposal for filling and operating the GERD is annexed.
Acknowledgements
M.B.’s doctoral degree is funded by the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Manchester. This work was supported by the UK Research and Innovation Economic and Social Research Council (ES/P011373/1) as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund through the ‘Future Design and Assessment of Water-Energy-Food-Environment Mega Systems’ (FutureDAMS) research project, in which J.J.H. served as research director. The authors thank GAMS Software GmbH for providing optimization solver licences compatible with deploying the economy-wide simulation on supercomputers. The authors acknowledge the use of the Computational Shared Facility and High-Performance Computing of the University of Manchester. The views expressed in this article are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of their institutions.
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Basheer, M., Nechifor, V., Calzadilla, A. et al. Negotiating Nile infrastructure management should consider climate change uncertainties. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 17–19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01557-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01557-5
