"Many of the towns and urban areas in the north of the [Nile] Delta will suffer from a rise in the level of the Mediterranean with effect from 2020, and about 15 percent of Delta land is under threat from the rising sea level and its seepage into the ground water," Egypt's Environment Minister George Maged told a parliamentary committee in Cairo earlier in March.

He said joint studies by his ministry and the United Nations have assessed the situation is urgent, adding that Egypt is planning to start an international campaign to look for solutions.

Is the Egyptian official being too hasty with predictions that in less than 15 years a large portion of the Delta region in northern Egypt will be submerged?

"Of course this is exaggerated. I think it's a gross misunderstanding," Mostapha Saleh, head of Environmental Quality International (EQI) in Egypt, said. In his opinion, the minister was overstating the dangers, which he said come become "critical," in order to create international awareness of the situation facing the country.

Saleh does believe the situation facing Egypt is in need of attention. But according to the data he has seen, "if sea levels rise by one meter that would bring water inland 60 to 70 kilometers [around 40 miles], so it is not necessarily a large portion of the Delta."

According to Muhammad al-Raey, a professor of environmental studies at Alexandria University, the threat to the Delta region – an alluvial plain that sits only about 2.5 meters (8 feet) above sea level – needs to be watched.

He recently wrote in Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper that climate change could lead "to an increase in the frequency and severity of sandstorms, and longer periods of drought followed by more intense flooding. This is expected to lead to public health problems, including the spread of epidemics, especially in poorer regions."

A 2004 report issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) corroborates Raey's assertions. In the study, they argue that an increase of just one degree centigrade could lead to large evaporation losses and significantly reduce Nile flows, if the assumption that a 4 percent increase in evaporation per degree is taken into account.

Raey says the Mediterranean is already on course to flooding northern Egypt, having raised an average of 2 millimeters annually for the past decade. "It has already flooded parts of Egypt's shoreline," he says.

Generally, scientists predict the Mediterranean will rise by as little as 30 centimeters (one foot) to one meter (3.3 feet) by the end of the century. Even a one-meter rise in the level will submerge Alexandria.

Cairo is beginning to discuss the impacts of global warming and has sought a "national strategy study" in order to combat the coming floods.

In Alexandria, the local government is spending $300 million building concrete walls to protect the city's beaches, and in some areas sand is being dumped to help replenish deteriorating beaches.

An official at Egypt's Water Resources and Irrigation said the government is currently examining a "vulnerability index and attempting to determine the country's areas under the largest threat."

Hussein al-Atfy, the deputy director to the minister, says Egypt is attempting to protect its shores as a first barrier. But that won't be enough.

"We are currently doing this on the beaches in the north, but after this the government will need to ask the world for help. It costs too much for Egypt to take on all this on our own so the international community needs to assist us," he said.

Egypt, like the entire Middle East region, needs to be prepared for what is to come, Munqeth Mehyar, the director of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) said ahead of his organization's presentation of a security risk assessment of climate change in the Middle East for the annual U.N. conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia.

"Being left unprepared will affect not only economic, physical and environmental security, but national, regional and global security, if actions are not taken now to mitigate and adapt to, the projected impacts of climate change," Mehyar said earlier this month.

His organization believes Alexandria is not the only major population center that will be affected by rising sea levels. The coastal groundwater in Gaza, FoEME reports, will make the small Mediterranean strip of land nearly uninhabitable for the 1.5 million Palestinians living there.

"It will be essential for the most developed countries to provide developing countries with technical and financial assistance in adapting to climate change," he added.

The region should be worried that the current trends in rising sea levels combined with global warming are threatening these nations' very existence. More efforts, Saleh of EQI said, are needed in order to stem the tide and educate both government and people to work together in bringing about real and viable solutions to climate change and global warming.

"We all have to do our part if we are to see the places we live in continue in the years ahead," he warned.