Lake Manzala Engineered Wetland: Treating Drainage Water Before Egypt's Largest Lagoon

Built from 2001 with a US$4.5 million GEF grant alongside UNDP and Egyptian government co-financing (total project cost about US$11.1 million), the Lake Manzala Engineered Wetland is a roughly 100-hectare constructed wetland southwest of Port Said, Egypt. It intercepts a portion of the heavily polluted Bahr El Baqar drain — which carries municipal, industrial and agricultural wastewater — and passes it through vegetated treatment cells designed to trap sediment and reduce pollutant loads before the water reaches Lake Manzala, Egypt's largest coastal lagoon, and ultimately the Mediterranean Sea.
Project documentation and follow-up hydrodynamic and water-quality studies report measurable improvements in water and sediment quality attributable to the wetland, and the treated effluent is used to rear juvenile fish for restocking the lake and supplying other aquaculture operations, demonstrating a low-cost alternative to conventional treatment plants for the region.
The honest caveat is scale: Lake Manzala's own commercial fish yield, once over half of Egypt's total catch in the 1980s, is estimated to have fallen to around 11% of historical levels by 2020 because of basin-wide eutrophication, heavy-metal pollution and habitat loss that a single 100-hectare facility cannot reverse. The case illustrates both the value and the limits of a wetland-treatment approach when it treats only one drain among many feeding a heavily stressed water body.

Read the full analysis: https://iwlearn.net/iw-projects/395