Nizar Baraka at «Club de L’Economiste»: More than a billion cubic meters of water lost each year!
After being in a situation of water stress, Morocco entered a phase of water scarcity. And in recent years, the phenomenon has exacerbated. So much so that the Kingdom has launched an emergency plan to secure its water supply to meet the needs of its population and its socio-economic development. Several challenges and constraints face this strategy, starting with the demand for water, which is on the rise due to galloping urbanization. According to projections by the Ministry of Equipment and Water, headed by Nizar Baraka, water demand in 2050 could reach 18.6 billion cubic meters, compared to 16.2 billion cubic meters in 2020. Several decades ago, the country has bet big on the construction of dams. The pace accelerated with the onset of severe drought in the early 1980s. The government must now deal with the natural phenomenon of dam siltation, due to climatic conditions, the nature of soil, the relief, and the vegetation, a phenomenon which calls into question the water reserves. To illustrate the issue, the Mohammed V dam, supposed to have a capacity of 13 billion cubic meters, only contains in fact one million cubic meters. The phenomenon is aggravated by desertification which affects vegetation. Minister Nizar Baraka speaks of a potential of 23 million hectares that would be targeted. «The volume of water lost each year is estimated between 0.1 and 11 million cubic meters per dam», he points out. A problem that must be quickly taken care of by the public authorities to avoid losses that would aggravate the water situation in Morocco.
The analysis of data relating to changes in the water potential at groundwater level leads to two observations. Some water tables have experienced an average drop of one meter per year; this is the case of the Souss, Fez-Meknes, Haouz, and Tadla water tables, among others. Others were marked by a certain stability or a less pronounced average drop than in the previous category, i.e. less than one meter per year: this is the case of the Aïn Beni Mathar, Berrechid, Chaouia, Angad, Rmel, Gharb, and Laâyoune water tables. Morocco loses more than one billion cubic meters of water each year due to the overexploitation of groundwater, aggravated by the scarcity of rain. For the Berrechid region alone, the losses are more than 2 million cubic meters per year. In recent years, we have lost 20 million cubic meters.
Morocco receives on average each year some 140 billion cubic meters of rain per year. 122 billion do evaporate due to heat, which has increased. The goal within the framework of COP22 is to reduce it by 2 degrees. Morocco experienced a temperature rise of about 1.5 degrees. The mobilization capacity via the dams is 18 billion cubic meters. The remaining four billion do seep through the groundwater. Morocco has experienced extreme temperatures and high levels of rain and snowfall. Therefore, the challenge is to store this precious water. The minister points out that every year 4 billion cubic meters of water go to the sea due to the lack of storage capacity. In addition, Morocco faces a problem of supplying its aquifers. To do so, it was a question of building one thousand hill dams, at the rate of about forty per year, but this project did not come into being. As a result, Morocco has only 135 of them.
The other major challenge facing the effectiveness of the water strategy concerns the losses at the level of the hydraulic pipes which must be maintained on an ongoing basis. The water strategy is handicapped by the question of financing and the difficulty of financing projects through the sale price of water, which remains well below its real cost. Added to this is the lack of private interest in investing in water.
Hassan EL ARIF
