Part of a major push to green Egypt’s deserts, the New Delta project aims to transform 2.2 million feddans (9,240 square kilometers, or 3,500 square miles) of mostly barren desert west of the Nile Delta into productive farmland. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) and OLI-2 on Landsat 8 and 9 captured this pair of images showing the expansion of green landscapes in parts of the Alexandria and Beheira governorates in November 2018 (left) and November 2024 (right).
Much of the new development is spread along a highway that connects El Dabba on Egypt’s north coast to Cairo. Note the canal extending northeastward from the upper left of the image. With the help of several pumping stations, this waterway transports wastewater from a holding lake in Alexandria to a new treatment plant to the south. Completed in 2023, it can process 7.5 million cubic meters of wastewater per day, enough to make it the largest wastewater and sludge treatment plant in the world, according to Guinness World Records.
Plans call for recycled water from the plant to feed into irrigation networks that supply the proliferating croplands in the area, but the system will not provide all the water that thirsty crops need. Pumped groundwater and water from a canal that connects to the Rosetta Branch of the Nile are also important sources of water for the region.
New farmland is also appearing in many other parts of Egypt. Boston University researchers used decades of observations from Landsat satellites to map areas where agricultural lands spread, were lost to urbanization, or abandoned between 1987 and 2019. They mapped 16,000 square kilometers of new farmland in Egypt, mostly in the Nile River valley and delta near existing agriculture. Over the same period, farmers abandoned 1,700 square kilometers, and new development occurred on 2,300 square kilometers of farmland. The results can be explored in this interactive map.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
