River Deltas and Power

Where rivers meet the sea, they create deltas — some of Earth's most productive and contested land. The Nile Delta, just 2% of Egypt's area, supports about half of its agriculture and 40 million people.

The Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta is the world's largest, covering 100,000 square kilometers. Over 150 million people depend on its floods for farming, yet rising seas threaten much of it.

Deltas face a double threat: upstream dams trap sediment while the sea erodes their edges. Without action, some densely populated regions could vanish beneath the waves.