The Cairo Accord
In November 2022, delegates from nearly two hundred countries landed in Sharm El-Sheikh for COP27. For two weeks Egypt was where the world discussed our climate. This autumn I will fly to Egypt too, one undergraduate beginning a year abroad in Cairo, and I have been wondering what my own negotiation should look like. Countries write treaties when they want to be held to something. So I have written myself one.
The problem is easy to state. Flying from London to Cairo and back will cost about a tonne of carbon dioxide, my biggest single emission of the year, and Egypt will feel the damage from flights like mine long before Britain does. Parts of the Nile Delta could be under the sea within my lifetime. Cairo’s air is often thick enough to see. The river that supplies nearly all of Egypt’s fresh water is under serious strain. I cannot study Arabic in Cairo without flying there, but I can decide what kind of guest I intend to be once I arrive.
So, the articles.
Article one: I will fly once. One return ticket for the whole year. No trip home at Christmas, no weekend hops around the region. The flight I cannot avoid, I will offset through a Gold Standard project, priced with the myclimate calculator, which puts an honest, slightly painful number on it.
Article two: inside Egypt, I will stay on the ground. When I visit Luxor and Aswan, I will take the Watania sleeper train instead of a domestic flight, which cuts the journey’s emissions by around ninety percent and lets me watch the Nile valley go by all night, which sounds like the better deal anyway. In Cairo itself, the metro. It costs pennies and it works.
Article three: I will carry one filtered bottle all year, because Cairo runs on single-use plastic and I would rather not. I intend to volunteer with VeryNile, which pulls plastic out of the river itself, and with Banlastic Egypt, which campaigns to end single-use plastics.
Article four: I will consume like a local. Vegetables in season from the souq, furniture secondhand from the Friday Market, recycling traded through the Bekia app, surplus food rescued through Tekeya.
Article five: I am a newly qualified English teacher, and I will teach this. Sustainability will sit inside my lesson plans, and at the end of the year I will write a plain, practical guide for future SOAS students on how to live this city lightly.
The UN gives these commitments numbers. Staying on the ground is climate action, goal thirteen. The metro is sustainable cities, goal eleven. The bottle and the river work serve clean water and life below water, goals six and fourteen. Buying secondhand is responsible consumption, goal twelve. Teaching it is quality education, goal four, and that one matters most to me, because a habit kept is one tonne saved, and a habit taught is many.
Signed in London. Witnessed, by the Nile.
