Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Science Team

Today, in a conference taking place in the library of Alexandria in Egypt, chaos erupted in in the hall over a very simple issue: Will the Nile Delta in Egypt disappear due to climate change?

The Nile Delta is a very fertile lowland area at the end of the River Nile, just before it meets the Mediterranean Sea. This fertile triangle of land is responsible for 50 percent of all crops grown in Egypt, making it of enormous importance for the country’s food security. Most global climate models put the Nile Delta as one of the most endangered regions in the world due to sea level rise.

The conference gathered top scientists and researchers from the Middle East region for a dialogue on environmental issues that challenge development in the Arab world, including food security, water poverty and climate change. This was part of a series of planned dialogues to review the latest Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), released in late 2009.

Chaos erupted, however, when one of the presenters said that the Nile Delta, which is documented as one of the most threatened areas in the world due to climate change, was in no danger whatsoever. No flooding was going to take place, land salinity was not going to increase, and millions of people were not threatened with becoming environmental refugees.

Confusion abounded as some scientists agreed while others disagreed, with each of them arguing passionately, and sometimes angrily, for their point of view. Some said they’ve worked on research that proved one point or the other, while others took it as a chance to attack the results of the IPCC as “inaccurate, misleading, and politicized.”

The problem is that all arguments were weak and not a single one cited a peer-reviewed paper. Many of the scientists arguing that the Delta region was not sinking said that the global models were wrong and inaccurate. However, we have very few, if any, reliable regional climate models..

Mahendra Shah, director of the Qatar National Food Security Programme, commented to me recently that the Middle East region “has not really assessed what will be the impacts of climate change, and the first thing to do to assess this is by looking at the global climate change models.”

That makes perfect sense, and it is definitely high time we started to do serious, international-quality research into climate change impacts on the region, because no one else is going to do it for us.

But until we do, I believe that the advice given by Dr. Ibrahim Abdel Gelil, director of the Environmental Management Programme in the Arab Gulf University, during the discussion, to “take the path of precaution until we have substantial data,” is definitely very, very sound advice.