CAIRO: At the southeastern edge of Cairo, only 10km from downtown and 15 minutes from Maadi, a lonely desert valley called Wadi Degla spreads some 30km from west to east. Cairo's most popular urban protectorate was established in 1999 in an effort to tame urban and industrial expansion from engulfing into the delicate and so far untouched area. Sadly, today, this very expansion is jeopardizing the protected area. A buffer zone that lines the border of the park was designed to hold back neighboring industrial facilities, from stone quarries, chemical plants, to a waste-recycling site. Yet the protectorate's condition is at danger, as industrial activities and devastations in the Wadi itself have accumulated in the last month. Quarry companies located in Shaq el Taaban in the west of the Wadi have taken advantage of the situation of political uncertainty in Egypt, and have started to cave out wedges of land far into the protectorate's territory. The intrusions started right after Eid. The companies reportedly dig during the night, as to escape the eyes of the guardians and of park visitors. According to Samer Behnam, a member of a Mountain Bike Egypt, a bike group doing weekly trips through the Wadi, intrusions of the quarry companies into the forbidden buffer zone had increased in the last couple years. His group refrained from reporting, hoping that the activities would stay limited to this area; a fact that they now direly regret, as the trucks have moved large amounts of gravel and rock from within the protected area and left vast spaces of devastation. Traces of industrial expansion in the protectorate. According to Tareq el Qanawaty, the protectorate's manager within the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, the quarry companies responsible for the devastations were identified three weeks ago and talks were held with them. They are now in the process of being fined. El Qanawaty has to coordinate delicately with various industrial interest groups, the police, the local Bedouin communities and his own department. For the protection of Wadi Degla, cooperation with the local Bedouin tribes is paramount, even more so as the area has open borders. A vacuum in security forces in post-revolution Egypt has aggravated the situation, however, Bedouin tribes take on an important role in the protection of the Wadi, in detecting violations and in the arbitration of conflicts. Cooperation with the local police, who are needed to issue and process fines for the violations, has proved to be more tenacious lately. According to Mr. el Qanawaty, police work has been staggering in the aftermath of the revolution – not surprisingly. Environmental issues are a second priority at best. Yet more alarming, the intrusions have still continued over the last two weeks, reported by the bike group; whether the perpetrators are the same companies or not remains unclear. Neither the park manager nor the two guardians at the gate were aware of the latest intrusions at the point this article was written. It is important to note that the happenings in Wadi Degla are indicative for the situation in all of Egypt's protected areas. So what is the future outlook for their conservation? Some of the top positions in the environmental department such as the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs and the Director of the Nature Conservation Sector are still open, so it is difficult to say in which direction environmental policy will head. Yet from a lower level, the facts of reality such as a malfunctioning police and court system are likely to have a bigger short-term effect on the status of the PAs, as Mr. el Qanawaty emphasizes. Traces of industrial development in Wadi Degla. With a territory of only 60km2,Wadi Degla is one of the smaller ones of Egypt's 29 protected areas (PAs), which in total cover a sizeable 15% of the country's territory. The protectorates were established on the base of Law 102 that dates back to 1983, when the government increased efforts to preserve Egypt's invaluable natural treasures. Mindy Baha el Din, board member and secretary of the NGO Nature Conservation Egypt (NCE) and an environmentalist, stresses that starting a decade ago, one could observe a gradual deterioration of the status of PAs, indicative of the former regime's disregard for nature conservation. From the political side, there has been lack of awareness and willingness to invest in the protection of Egypt's natural and cultural heritage. With the assignment of General Maged George Elias Ghattass as the Minister of State for Environmental Affairs in 2004, the situation visibly changed for the worse. Under his supervision, observers noted a creeping militarization of the Ministry of Environmental Affairs with the pouring-in of military personal. According to NCE, many problems facing the PAs and nature conservation in general cannot be tackled in isolation. It would take an increased cross-department cooperation and a more active involvement and consultation with local NGOs. Yet in a system that prioritizes military rank and affiliation to managerial skills or environmental background in the staffing of the ministerial positions, there is not much hope for improvement. A groundbreaking report called “Management Effectiveness Evaluation of Egypt's Protected Area System,” by the Nature Conservation Sector within the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), dating back to June 2006, finds that Egypt's PAs are chronically under-resourced, far below the norm for the region and even for Africa. In Egypt, the total expenditure on PAs is only about 11 percent of the average for developing countries. In order to match the regional norms, Egypt would need to see a four to nine fold increase on current expenditure. In the run of Mubarak's neoliberal policies, these numbers have certainly not turned to the better in the last five years. So the PA system stays vulnerable as a result of poor law enforcement, overexploitation of resources, and lack of resources. Local advocacy groups in these circumstances take an on a crucial role. And here lies the chance for Wadi Degla; it can draw on an established community of supporters advocating the conservation of the protectorate. Only with their efforts reporting violations and spreading them via social media to make them public can the intrusions hopefully be stopped. Yet in the medium and long term, it is paramount to increase the promotion of the parks. Nature Conservation Egypt stresses the fact that the protectorates were established and then not fully utilized as to promote their value and use for the greater society, for science, for education, and to raise the public awareness of Egypt's natural treasuries. Hopefully future developments will take us there. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/gE7SE Tags: featured, Wadi Degla Section: Egypt, Environment, Features, Going Green, Latest News
