By Aya Nader, BECAUSE “I call it the destruction bridge.” This is how Samer Aly, a diver who has been living in Sinai for thirty years, described the recently revived project to connect Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with Saudi Arabia. Murmurs about building the fifty kilometer bridge emerged in the 1980s and then again in 2008. President Hosni Mubarak had turned it down, only for the idea to resurface in 2013 at the time of his successor Mohamed Morsi. Numerous accounts of how the bridge would kill marine life have been recorded throughout this time. 2016 is in many ways a landmark year for global environmental efforts. This year, the United Nations Development Programme have launched seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, of which the fourteenth is Life Below Water, which concerns itself with sustaining marine resources and habitats. According to this goal, we should be aiming to “sustainably manage and protect marine and coastal ecosystems.” Yet according to Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index, the most comprehensive global environmental assessment to date, Egypt ranks only 116 out of 180 for its performance on biodiversity—and this is a problem when the Red Sea’s marine…
