(14 Jul 2020) Fears that a giant new dam in Ethiopia could cause water shortages in Egypt and Sudan are not justified at this stage, an environmental expert said Tuesday.
Ethiopia is due to start filling its $4.6 billion hydroelectric dam on the River Nile, alarming its neighbours downstream.
But Kevin Wheeler of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University said the escalating rhetoric over the dam had more to do with politics than water.
"The fears of any sort of shortage are not justified at this stage at all," he commented.
"If there were a drought over the next several years, that certainly could become a risk. But the level of rhetoric right now is really based on the changing dynamics within the (Nile) Basin and the changing sort of power dynamics in some ways within the Basin."
The latest round of negotiations between the three countries ended Monday without agreement.
The setback sunk modest hopes that they could resolve their differences before Ethiopia begins to fill the dam.
Ethiopia had previously pledged to start filling the reservoir, even without a deal over its operation, at the start of the wet season in July, when rains flood the Blue Nile.
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