Abstract
This study investigates the dynamic relationships between Egypt’s Food Security Indicator and climate change, political stability, renewable energy use, population growth, share of water from the Nile River, and agricultural productivity from 1990 to 2023. Employing Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) frameworks, Strong persistence in food security, immediate negative consequences of climate change, and notable positive contributions from renewable energy and agricultural production are all evident in short-term results. While Nile water reliance is advantageous in the short term, population increase puts negative pressure. Over time, food security is negatively impacted by climate change and reliance on Nile water (caused by systemic inefficiencies), although agricultural productivity and renewable energy continue to be significant positive drivers. Granger causality shows that there are reciprocal relationships between food security, agricultural production, and renewable energy. Accelerating the adoption of renewable energy, improving climate-resilient agriculture, restructuring Nile water administration to address inefficiencies and over-extraction, increasing agricultural productivity, and combining population management with resource allocation are among the policy priorities.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data presented in this study is available on request from the corresponding author.
References
Moussa, L.G.; Mohan, M.; Pitumpe Arachchige, P.S.; Rathnasekara, H.; Abdullah, M.; Jaffar, A.; Montenegro, J.F.; Kale, A.; Heng, J.; King, ShaliniA.L.; et al. Impact of Water Availability on Food Security in GCC: Systematic Literature Review-Based Policy Recommendations for a Sustainable Future. Environmental Development 2025, 54, 101122, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2024.101122.
Onyeaka, H. et al. The Ripple Effects of Climate Change on Agricultural Sustainability and Food Security in Africa. Food and Energy Security 13, e567. https://doi.org/10.1002/fes3.567 (2024).
Guiné, R. P. F. The Challenges and Strategies of Food Security under Global Change. Foods 13, 2083. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods13132083 (2024).
Kertolli, E. et al. The Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystem Nexus in North Africa Dryland Farming: A Multi-Criteria Analysis of Climate-Resilient Innovations in Morocco. Agric Econ 12, 34. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40100-024-00327-5 (2024).
Derouez, F. & Ifa, A. Sustainable Food Security: Balancing Desalination, Climate Change, and Population Growth in Five Arab Countries Using ARDL and VECM. Sustainability 16, 2302. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16062302 (2024).
Henri Aurélien, A.B.; Bruno Emmanuel, O.N. Climate Change and Political Stability in African States: The Role of Agricultural Food Price Volatility. Environ Dev Sustain 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-05358-y.
Aloui, Z. & Maktouf, S. The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment and Political Stability on Food Security: Evidence from Sub-Saharan African Countries. Comp Econ Stud 66, 289–328. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-023-00222-w (2024).
De Bernardi, P.; Azucar, D. The Food System Grand Challenge: A Climate Smart and Sustainable Food System for a Healthy Europe. In Innovation in Food Ecosystems; Contributions to Management Science; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2020; pp. 1–25 ISBN 978–3–030–33501–4.
Miladinov, G. Impacts of Population Growth and Economic Development on Food Security in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries. Front. Hum. Dyn. 5, 1121662. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2023.1121662 (2023).
Izraelov, M. & Silber, J. An Assessment of the Global Food Security Index. Food Sec. 11, 1135–1152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00941-y (2019).
Malthus, T.R. An Essay on the Principle of Population. In Evolution in Victorian Britain; Routledge, 2024; pp. 25–40.
Maisonet-Guzman, O.E. Food Security and Population Growth in the 21st Century. E-International Relations 2011.
Derouez, F. & Ifa, A. Desalination for Food Security in Tunisia: Harnessing Renewable Energy to Address Water Scarcity and Climate Change by Using ARDL Approach and VECM Technical. Sustainability 17, 1046. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17031046 (2025).
Alqudah, H.; Amran, N.A.; Hassan, H.; Lutfi, A.; Alessa, N.; Almaiah, M.A. Examining the Critical Factors of Internal Audit Effectiveness from Internal Auditors’ Perspective: Moderating Role of Extrinsic Rewards. Heliyon 2023.
Asaki, F. A., Oteng-Abayie, E. F. & Baajike, F. B. Effects of Water, Energy, and Food Security on Household Well-Being. PLoS ONE 19, e0307017. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307017 (2024).
Hasan, Md. M. & Adnan, A. T. M. Nexus between Environmental Sustainability, Energy Intensity and Food Security: Evidence from Emerging Economies. JBSED 5, 139–154. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBSED-05-2023-0044 (2025).
Chen, X. & Yu, G. The Impact of Urban-Rural Integration on Food Security: Evidence from Provincial Panel Data in China. Sustainability 16, 3815. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16093815 (2024).
Bergene, T., Simane, B., Abi, M. & Maru, H. Food Security Situation of Rain-Fed Subsistence Farming in the Hamassa Watershed Agroecologies. Ethiopia. Cogent Social Sciences 10, 2376849. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2024.2376849 (2024).
Duda, A. M. & El-Ashry, M. T. Addressing the Global Water and Environment Crises through Integrated Approaches to the Management of Land. Water and Ecological Resources. Water International 25, 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060008686803 (2000).
Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security; FAO, Ed.; The state of food and agriculture; FAO: Rome, 2016; ISBN 978–92–5–109374–0.
Cai, X. & Rosegrant, M. W. Water Management and Food Production in China and India: A Comparative Assessment. Water Policy 7, 643–663. https://doi.org/10.2166/wp.2005.0039 (2005).
Climate Change and Food Security; Lobell, D., Burke, M., Eds.; Advances in Global Change Research; Springer Netherlands: Dordrecht, 2010; Vol. 37; ISBN 978–90–481–2952–2.
Li, Y., Ye, W., Wang, M. & Yan, X. Climate Change and Drought: A Risk Assessment of Crop-Yield Impacts. Clim. Res. 39, 31–46. https://doi.org/10.3354/cr00797 (2009).
Zhao, C. et al. Temperature Increase Reduces Global Yields of Major Crops in Four Independent Estimates. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 114, 9326–9331. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701762114 (2017).
Derouez, F., Ifa, A. & Al Shammre, A. Energy Transition and Poverty Alleviation in Light of Environmental and Economic Challenges: A Comparative Study in China and the European Union Region. Sustainability 16, 4468. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16114468 (2024).
Derouez, F., Ifa, A., Shammre, A. A., Zayed, M. & Alrawad, M. Socioeconomic and Climatic Factors Influencing Desertification in Saudi Arabia through an ARDL Approach. Sci Rep https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-34168-z (2025).
Lutfi, A., Ashraf, M., Watto, W. A. & Alrawad, M. Do Uncertainty and Financial Development Influence the FDI Inflow of a Developing Nation?. A Time Series ARDL Approach. Sustainability 14, 12609. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912609 (2022).
Pesaran, M. H., Shin, Y. & Smith, R. J. Bounds Testing Approaches to the Analysis of Level Relation-Ships. J. Appl. Economet. 16, 289–326 (2001).
Pesaran, M.H.; Pesaran, B. Working with Microfit 4.0: Interactive Econometric Analysis; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1997; Vol. 29;.
Pesaran, M. H., Shin, Y. & Smith, R. J. Structural Analysis of Vector Error Correction Models with Exogenous I(1) Variables. Journal of Econometrics 97, 293–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4076(99)00073-1 (2000).
Pesaran, M. H., Shin, Y. & Smith, R. J. Bounds Testing Approaches to the Analysis of Level Relationships. J. Appl. Economet. 16, 289–326 (2001).
Derouez, F. & Ifa, A. Assessing the Sustainability of Southeast Asia’s Energy Transition: A Comparative Analysis. Energies 18, 287. https://doi.org/10.3390/en18020287 (2025).
Haug, A. A. Temporal Aggregation and the Power of Cointegration Tests: A Monte Carlo Study*. Oxford Bull. Econ. Stat. 64, 399–412 (2002).
Johansen, S. & Juselius, K. MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION AND INFERENCE ON COINTEGRATION — WITH APPLICATIONS TO THE DEMAND FOR MONEY. Oxf Bull Econ Stat 52, 169–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1990.mp52002003.x (1990).
Engle, R.F.; Granger, C.W.J. Co-integration and error-correction: Representation, estimation, and testing. Econometrica 1987, 55(2, 251–276.
Pesaran, M.H.; Shin, Y. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag Modelling Approach to Cointegration Analysis. In Proceedings of the Econometrics and Economic Theory in the 20th Century: The Ragnar Frisch Centennial Symposium; Strom, S., Ed.; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1999; pp. 371–413.
Derouez, F.; Ifa, A. Sustainable Food Security: Balancing Desalination, Climate Change, and Population Growth in Five Arab Countries Using ARDL and VECM. Sustainability 2024, 16(6, 2302.
Funding
This work was supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research, Vice Presidency for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia [Grant No. KFU260135].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
A.I. and F.D. did the conceptualization; F.D. and M.A. did the Validation; F.D. did the formal analysis.; Resources, F.D.; Data curation, A.I.; Writing—original draft, F.D. and M.A.; Writing—review and editing, A.I. and M.A., M.Z. review and editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Derouez, F., Ifa, A., Alrawad, M. et al. The effects of climate change water dependency and policy solutions on food security in Egypt. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-38489-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-38489-5
