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APPENDIX C
Egypt
TUNISIA
SYRIA
LEBANON PALESTINIAN TERR. JORDAN
MOROCCO ALGERIA
IRAQ KUWAIT
LIBYA
EGYPT
SAUDI
BAHRAIN QATAR
ARABIA
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
MAURITANIA
OMAN YEMEN
SUDAN DJIBOUTI
SOMALIA
E
gypt occupies 10.6 million hectares of productive land and water. Of those, 68 thousand are forest, 3.5 million are cropland, and 1.4 million support the country’s built infrastructure. Egypt also has 5.6 million hectares of continental shelf and inland water to support fisheries. Taking into account differences between average regional yields for cropland, grazing land, forest, and fisheries as compared with corresponding global yields, Egypt’s total biocapacity is 51 million gha. This is much less than its total Ecological Footprint of 133 million gha. Egypt’s average Ecological Footprint per person is 1.7 gha, slightly more than half the global per capita footprint of 2.7 gha. Compared to the rest of the world, the average footprint of an inhabitant in Egypt is small, and for many, it is too small to meet basic food, shelter, health, and sanitation, needs. In order to make vital quality of life improvements, large segments of the country’s population must have greater access to
COMOROS
natural resources. Meeting this need will involve multiple strategies: significant improvement in resource efficiency and expansion of biocapacity without resource intensive production. Since it is likely that the Ecological Footprint of Egypt will then rise, a corresponding decrease will be required in the Ecological Footprint of other high per capita consumption regions of the world, just to maintain the global average footprint constant. As indicated in Figure 23, Egypt’s Ecological Footprint per person is greater than the country’s 0.7 global hectares of biocapacity available per person due to a high rate of growth in both consumption and population. The country’s Ecological Footprint per person grew 94 percent between 1961 and 2008, while the population grew by almost 3-fold. Over the same time period, the biocapacity available per person increased by only 21 percent.