Reply to Comment on ‘Egypt’s water budget deficit and suggested mitigation policies for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam filling scenarios’

The reply herein shows the factual incorrectness of the comment by Eladawy, Asefa and El Nour, which is primarily supported by miscitations and misinterpretations of published research, as well as by claims from social media and unreliable TV interviews. The comment mistakenly ommit the different components of the calculated total water budget deficit in our paper and accordingly claims that it is primarily aimed to create a ‘water panic’, a term that derives from a non-quantitative and subjective reading of the abstract. We show in detail that the comment misrepresents the aim, approach, results, and interpretations reported in our original paper and does not provide any verification on the reproducibility of our results, nor offers any alternative interpretations or suggested impacts on our conclusions which remain valid and unchallenged by the above comment.