Yezid Sayigh is a senior fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where he works on the comparative political and economic roles of Arab armed forces, the impact of war on states and societies, and the politics of authoritarian resurgence. Recently, in the context of his work on Egypt’s armed forces, he published a paper titled, “Do No Harm: Toward an Environmental Audit of Military-Managed Civilian Projects in Egypt.” In the paper, he examined how military-managed projects might be made more environmentally friendly, and made several specific proposals in this regard. Diwan interviewed Sayigh in early December in order to discuss the topic of his paper.
Michael Young: You’ve just published a paper on the environmental dimensions of military-managed projects in Egypt. What is your argument?
Yezid Sayigh: My argument is straightforward. Egypt faces severe environmental challenges, which global warming is intensifying and accelerating. Along with the rest of North Africa, it experiences temperature increases that are up to twice the global average, and is especially vulnerable to the impacts of rising sea levels due to the concentration of a large part of its population and agricultural production in the low-lying Nile Delta. Climate change is already exacerbating water scarcity, increasing the salinity of aquifers, degrading soil, reducing agricultural and labor productivity, and worsening food insecurity.
The Egyptian military has delivered 25–38 percent of all publicly funded construction—including dozens of new cities and transport infrastructure—over the past decade, and is expanding its cultivation of desert land and extraction of minerals. These sectors are all notably water- and energy-intensive, and so their potential environmental impact is very significant. We are unable to measure this precisely, because all data pertaining to anything the military does is kept behind a firewall in the name of protecting national security, even when the activities concerned lie entirely within the civilian domain.
So my paper argues that Egypt cannot afford to maintain a business-as-usual approach: instead, state authorities must bring the military under the same national framework for future-proofing against climate change as for civilian actors. The reason for this is to ensure that environmental concerns are properly addressed in the design, implementation, and post-delivery phases of military-managed civilian projects.
MY: Can you assess the policy framework in place today in Egypt for achieving environmental objectives?
YS: The official policy framework looks good on paper, but largely lacks operational means for implementing and monitoring environmental checks and safeguards across government bodies and the economy in an integrated way. Urban planner Ibrahim Ezzeldin has argued that the government’s own National Strategy for Climate Change 2050, released in May 2022, acknowledged shortcomings in implementing relevant laws, a lack of experience and capability and of coordination between ministries and other agencies, inadequate funding, and limited civil society and private sector participation in developing environmental policy and practice. So, the framework for monitoring—let alone enforcing—military adherence to environmental goals and guidelines is not fit for purpose. Worryingly, the Egyptian authorities appear to approach the environment primarily as a means of generating external funding flows for supposedly “green” projects, which reduces their incentive to strengthen the policy framework and improve environmental behavior by civilian and military bodies alike.
MY: What do you see as the main problem in advancing environmental objectives? How have the Egyptian authorities approached major projects, and what have their priorities been?
YS: The main problem is that environmental objectives do not appear to be a genuine priority. As I note in my paper, generating cash flows is the real driver behind economic decisionmaking and the investment strategy pursued by President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi since he assumed office in 2014, which the military spearheads. One facet is a heavy emphasis on building new cities, many of which are billed as “smart” because they use various energy-saving or low carbon emission technologies. But although greening urban areas is acknowledged as an important part of global efforts to mitigate climate change effects, building new cities in Egypt largely aims at creating prime real estate that can generate revenue for the state. Specific projects may be branded as green or sustainable as a whole merely because they introduce a new technology or a minor component, whereas their wider impacts on things such as coastal erosion or water scarcity are overlooked. Ironically, Egypt has both a large housing gap and a massive volume of uninhabited housing, estimated at 11 million units in 2018.
A second facet of the president’s approach has been to invest in transport infrastructure so as to improve domestic and external trade, especially along the Suez Canal, to take advantage of Egypt’s straddling of global trade routes. This makes good economic sense, but there is an overemphasis on expanding road traffic, which is significantly more polluting than rail and river transport (both of which remain severely underdeveloped), in part because the military has exclusive commercial franchise over most national highways and a vested interest in building them. Similarly, external trade infrastructure is being developed with little visible regard for competing demands from other sectors such as new cities and renewable energy sites for land, energy, and water, and constructed on massive scale without pilot schemes or, in at least some cases, feasibility studies.
MY: How might the military advance environmental objectives in its projects?
YS: The military has an important role to play in preparing Egypt to face climate change disruptions. It has significant engineering expertise and capacity that could be put to good use in preparing vulnerable coastal areas to contain and cope with rising sea levels, for example. There is no reason, in principle, why military resources could not be deployed in support of civilian efforts to attain sustainable development goals and build resilience to climate change in general. But in order for this to be most effective, and to avoid maladaptation, such support must take place under two conditions: full transparency regarding feasibility and technical studies and project data in all stages; and civilian command. Fortunately, Egypt already has a template for making this official: in November 2022, the government pledged to the International Monetary Fund to subject military companies to the same standards of fiscal transparency and reporting obligations as all other state-owned enterprises and economic authorities. With the right political will, this commitment could be replicated in the environmental domain, so as to bring all military production of civilian goods and services within a single national framework alongside their civilian counterparts.
MY: But are such proposals likely to be implemented given the large autonomy that military-managed companies in Egypt appear to enjoy?
YS: It is true that rationalizing the military’s contribution to environmental goals requires reorienting it away from the current overriding focus on generating revenue for the state—and for itself—which in turn assumes the president’s agreement to such a pivot. There is little prospect of either shift at present. Military capture of public procurement contracts and other business activities remain on an expansionary trajectory. To take one example, the Egyptian Air Force manages the huge desert land reclamation project labelled “Future of Egypt” that was inaugurated in May 2022, and its managing vehicle, the Future of Egypt for Sustainable Development Authority, has added floating solar energy projects in Lake Nasser and Naga Hammadi and developing the economic potential of Lake Bardawil to its portfolio just in October and November 2024. The military moreover plays a growing and highly influential role in strategic management of the economy and of state investment through the financial advisor to the president, in addition to occupying chairmanships in numerous state-owned companies and so-called general economic authorities and membership in policy-setting national councils in key sectors such as industrial development.
MY: More generally, what are the risks if Egypt fails to achieve its environmental objectives? Might this have repercussions on exports, given that Western markets are increasingly imposing environmental standards?
YS: According to Egypt’s former national focal point for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Saber Osman, Egypt faces extreme weather events, heat and cold waves, increased humidity, flash floods, sand and dust storms, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, fertile land salinity, and inundation. This threatens the entirety of the country’s ecosystem—which encompasses population, agriculture, and water resources—and major economic sectors and income earners such as food exports and tourism.
This is bad enough, but worse is the risk of cascading environmental threats: wrong choices made now degrade the ecosystem’s ability to cope with future challenges. Unfortunately, outside agencies such as the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development reinforce problematic behavior by Egyptian decisionmakers by financing supposedly “green” projects, without sufficient attention to the underlying flaws of the policy implementation context. This may result in maladaptation to climate change, worsening environmental damage, and raising costs—to Egypt as well as to international donors—of remedial action that will become necessary over the medium and long terms.
