Morocco is confronting a systemic vulnerability to climate shocks that is reshaping its economic and social landscape, according to a report published by L’Economiste daily. The newspaper reports that once-rare drought cycles now follow one another at an unprecedented pace, driving a sharp decline in freshwater reserves and a critical reduction in dam reservoir levels, a trend compounded by silt build-up that strips away tens of millions of cubic meters of storage capacity each year.
This chronic water scarcity coexists with a paradoxical rise in extreme rainfall events. Sudden flooding, now ranked among the country’s major hazards, has repeatedly disrupted commerce and industry in cities including Tangier, Casablanca and Agadir.
Authorities have launched a national flood management program carrying a budget of 5.7 billion dirhams through 2050, aimed at restructuring urban drainage and strengthening the resilience of major population centers.
Agriculture, which contributes 14 percent of GDP, has borne much of the impact. The historic 2022 drought, the worst in four decades, triggered annual losses of up to 500,000 tons of fruit in key farming basins such as the Gharb, Haouz and Saïss regions, according to L’Economiste, which notes that the phenomenon deepens the precarity of family farming and accelerates rural depopulation.
The social toll has fallen disproportionately on rural women, who make up 40 percent of the agricultural workforce but hold only 5 percent of farmland, the newspaper notes, pushing many to travel over 190 kilometres for income or to join seasonal migration to fruit farms in southern Spain.
Coastal and forest ecosystems face mounting strain too: marine heatwaves have caused mass die-offs among species such as clams and mussels, wildfires destroyed more than 178,000 hectares between 1960 and 2019, and coastal erosion carries an estimated economic cost of $434 million. L’Economiste also cites nearly 1,690 deaths linked to extreme weather and more than 4,000 buildings damaged or destroyed by floods and fires over two decades.
