Will a Nile canal project dry up Africa’s largest wetland? | Hacker News Reader

Will a Nile canal project dry up Africa’s largest wetland?

e360.yale.edu

47 pointsthread_id17 comments

Will we ever learn ? On a smaller scale, the Tagus-Segura water transfer project [0] in Spain is creating problems not only for Portugal who receives less water in the Tejo river, but also fueling unsustainable agriculture booms which in turn have created ecological disasters [1]

Often these water transfers introduce invasive species.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus-Segura_Water_Transfer

[1] https://inspain.news/mar-menor-is-victim-of-water-diversion-...

(THE TAGUS-SEGURA WATER TRANSFER Lessons from the past (pdf))

[2] http://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/tagusseguratr...

This plus Saudi Arabia and Qatar altering the weather to force rain for their needs

If we add climate change on top of geo-engineering, we'll see some nasty changes in the decades to come..

You can live for few weeks without eating, but without water, you die in 2 days

This sounds interesting Do you have links about details kd their efforts?

https://www.arabnews.com/node/1907871/middle-east

https://interestingengineering.com/saudi-arabia-launches-clo...

What I'm missing here is why send it to Egypt and not use it locally to improve agriculture in South Sudan?

Developing countries are pretty starved if foreign exchange. Perhaps local development sounds superior to cash, but look up "balance-of-payments-constrained growth". It's a tricky issue.

Egypt wants more water with sediments and minerals that haven't been deposited downstream and Sudan had suffered a lot from flooding. Win/Win+money.

Dams and canals have consequences, often unintended but not unforeseeable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

TBH this seems likely to happen. The rare "yes".

Yeah I agree it seems likely but Betteridge hasn't failed me yet, only time will tell.

It is no coincidence that once china brutally overtook power over Tibet it soon afterward deverted tibetian rivers to flow into china and away from their normal southernly trajectory

Seen on https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/china-preparing-wor...:

> "With new water from Tibet, Xinjiang would boom like California,"

War for water is getting real. RIP Bangladesh, East Indian States and Uyghur people, the former two for starving due to the loss of a huge water source for their crops, and the latter for becoming a stranger in their own lands after millions of Chinese flow into Xinjiang for jobs and cheap food/housing. Inflow being trivialized by high-speed rail.

They’ve also put a lot of dams on the Mekong River which is seriously affecting flow downstream in Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam.

I'm going to need to see a cite on this, as preliminary googling came up empty.

Many articles found when searching on duckduckgo with the keywords "China divert Tibet rivers"

I don't have any to recommend as I'm just starting to read them.

Yes I saw those, but they were all about stuff going on in the last few years or the future. I'm interested in the "soon afterwards" part.

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