RABAT — As
Morocco withers under its worst drought in 40 years, experts warn that a
combination of climate change and bad resource management could trigger severe
drinking water shortages.
اضافة اعلان
“The country hasn’t seen a situation like
this since the start of the 1980s,” said water policy expert Abderrahim
Hendouf.
While it was usually farmers who bore the
brunt of repeated droughts in the North African kingdom, today water supplies
to cities are under threat, water minister Nizar Baraka told parliament in
mid-March.
Morocco has had little rain since September,
and authorities say its reservoirs have received just 11 percent of what they
would in an average year.
“That’s a worrying sign,” Abdelaziz Zerouali,
the water ministry’s head of research and planning, told state television
station M2, adding that some preemptive measures had been taken to mitigate the
risks.
Two major cities, tourist hub
Marrakesh and
Oujda in the east already started tapping into groundwater reserves in December
to ensure adequate supplies.
The government in February also released a
package of around one billion euros in aid to the beleaguered agricultural
sector, which makes up some 14 percent of GDP and is the top employer in the
Moroccan countryside.
“We need to change our vision of water,”
Zerouali told a conference on the right to water in Rabat.
“Climate change is real and we will have to
face it.”
‘Absolute
scarcity’
Moroccans
have access to just 600 cubic meters of water per person per year, far below
the 2,600 cubic meters they enjoyed in the 1960s.
According to the
UN definition, water
scarcity occurs when supplies drop below 1,000 cubic meters per person
annually, while supplies of under 500 cubic meters are considered “absolute
scarcity”.
The decline in supplies in Morocco is a
result of a mix of environmental factors, high demand, and over-exploitation of
groundwater for farming, according to Baraka.
In a recent report for the
Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis, Amal Ennabih wrote that “Morocco’s water scarcity is
deeply linked to the way water is used in irrigation, consuming around 80
percent of Morocco’s water annually”.
The kingdom, with its Atlantic and
Mediterranean coastlines, hopes desalination plants can help make up the
deficit, although they are energy-intensive and pump brine back into the sea,
which causes its own environmental problems.
Moreover, efforts to build 15 more dams and
more desalination facilities have been bogged down by delays.
One such plant has been under construction
since 2020 near Casablanca, the country’s commercial capital, which could face
severe water shortages by 2025.
Baraka notes that a desalination plant meant
to serve the northeastern resort town of Saidia also has yet to come online,
causing water shortages.
Another desalination plant came online
recently, supplying 70 percent of the needs of the Atlantic coastal city of
Agadir, a tourist hub and the center of a major farming area.
That should provide some relief to a city that in autumn
2020 was so short of water that at night the taps ran dry.
Read more Region and World
.jpg)
.jpg)
