The week-long blockage of the Suez Canal by the huge Ever Given container ship last month has highlighted the world’s dependence on the trade route through which 30% of global shipping and 12% of the world’s goods are transported. International efforts have been revived for finding alternative routes.
According to UK newspaper “The Guardian,” UN officials are reviewing plans to dig a new canal along with Egypt-Israel border, after rejecting ideas for a more complex route via Iraq and Syria.
The UN, “The Guardian” reports has already commissioned a feasibility study from the international tunneling company OFP Lariol, which estimated that the Suez 2 Canal could be built in five years. The route of the canal would be from the Red Sea, just south of Eilat, in a straight line along the Israeli border to the Mediterranean.
However, the study’s author Ivor Shovel warned about, “The slight fall in sea levels in the Mediterranean that may happen once we flood the new canal, which could lead to wider and longer beaches.”
There are also a range of other proposed infrastructure projects, which would provide an alternative trading route to the Suez Canal. These include a railway from Eilat to Ashdod Port, an oil pipeline from Eilat to Ashkelon and a railway through Jordan into Israel and linking up to the Beit Shean – Haifa railway line. Anorther major infrastructure project being planned is the EastMed underwater gas pipeline linking up the offshore Israeli Leviathan field to Italy via Cyprus and Greece.
But environmentalists are less enthusiastic about these ambitious plans which could reshape the regional environment. Zalul Environmental Association CEO Maya Jacobs said, “The Suez Canal incident was an exceptional and unique occurrence that happens once in a generation and they are making it into an excuse and justification for developers to promote their megalomaniacal ideas and this is narrow economic opportunism.”
She added, “We welcome the desire of international organizations to assist in regional development, but instead of promoting enormous and expensive projects that will surely harm the environment, it would be better to invest the required capital to make the Middle East in general and the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat in particular into a focus of environmental innovation, which would promote solar energy solutions, protect the sea and coral and nature, and ensure the economic strength and health of future generations.
“Those international bodies that want to build new trade routes are also those who talk about the climate crisis and the need to encourage local consumption and the reduction of consumption. It is delusional to dramatically damage nature and the future of humanity by encouraging consumption and increasing the scale of cargoes being shipped instead of promoting better suited solutions to current needs.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on April 1, 2021
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