Search

Over the last few decades, Morocco has been undergoing a strong and fast water demand increase due to demographic upsurge, irrigated agriculture expansion, flourishing foreign trade and changing standard of living and lifestyles. The continued increase of water demand has imposed a height pressure over national scare water resources. Despite this worrying situation, the imperative of sustainable water use and management has created a need for compulsory information to define and implement economic and water-saving policies in an integrated and informed manner. This paper uses an input–output model of water use to analyse the relationships between economic sectors and water resources use in Morocco (i.e. direct water use) as well as the intersectoral water relationships (i.e. indirect water use). The results show that, on the one hand, Agriculture, hunting and forestry sector exhibits high direct water use. On the other hand, secondary and tertiary sectors display low direct use and high indirect water use. Typical examples of sectors with high indirect water use are manufacture of food and tobacco products and hotels and restaurants sectors. Further by means of the impact analysis, we have demonstrated that the economic sectors whose indirect water use coefficients are high have a significant influence on water resources by means of their “drag effect” on water use of other sectors. The results highlight the added value of conducting an analysis of the intersectoral water relationships and suggest that it is important to take into account in the processes of policy definition not only the direct water use but also the indirect water use, because neglecting them could threaten our water resources.

Over the last decades, Morocco has been facing increasingly severe water scarcity. To quantify water use in Morocco, we refer to the water footprint (WF) concept, including both direct and indirect water use. WF considered covers internal WF and exported virtual water (VW). We used the input-output structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to quantitatively analyze the drivers of changes in Morocco’s sectoral WF from 1995 to 2015. The considered mechanisms governing WF changes are the technological, economic system efficiency, and structural effects. The WF growth experienced in Morocco primarily resulted from final demand changes. The technological effect acted as an additional increase factor. Nevertheless, the economic system efficiency effect contributed to the water conservation process. Unfortunately, it was not sufficient to reverse the expansion of Morocco’s WF resulted from other driving factors. Agriculture is the dominant economic sector in WF changes, regardless of any driving factor and any period considered. The study provides insight into Morocco’s water policy limits and helps develop policies towards sustainable water resources planning and management. That is by suggesting that final demand structure adjustment and technological innovation in the agricultural sector should be at the center of Morocco’s strategies in addressing water scarcity.