Egypt’s environmental history offers a warning for COP27
This week, the global environmental elite will gather in the Egyptian tourist city of Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world’s largest coordinated initiative to attempt to address climate change. Egypt has a long history of environmental policymaking and, as host, it will influence the conference’s agenda.
Egypt is home to the world’s longest river and one of the largest cities in Africa and the Middle East. It possesses a written record of nearly 5,000 years of human interactions with nature, longer than most other places in the world. Egypt’s environmental history offers an important lesson for global policymakers today: Centralized authoritarian states are not equipped to address environmental change.
For the past 200 years, the Egyptian state has brought its power to bear on the management of land, water, infrastructure and agriculture. As governments in Egypt and elsewhere have centralized and monopolized power over the environment, they have distanced those who make decisions from those who must deal with the outcomes of those decisions. The result is an environmental policy that ignores individuals’ experiences with and knowledge of their environments in favor of silver bullet solutions that nearly always fail.