Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Morocco is one of the countries most threatened by climate change. These changes will have a negative impact on key sectors of its national economy, namely water and agriculture.
Projections predict that the water available for agriculture will decrease by 16 per cent by 2030 and 34 per cent by 2050. The main strategy for adaptation to this change is the conversion from surface, or flood, irrigation to drip irrigation. Morocco has initiated an ambitious program to convert 550 000 hectares to this more efficient irrigation system.
Stakeholders will be affected in different ways by this project but until now, no stakeholderfocused cost-benefit analysis has been conducted. The objective of this study is to address the economics of adapting to climate change in the irrigation water sector in Morocco, using the CBA-focused, multi-stakeholder approach to water sector adaptation developed by IIED.
This method combines cost-benefit analysis (CBA) with a more participatory stakeholder analysis in order to support effective decision making by identifying cross-sector benefits, highlighting areas of mutual interest among different stakeholders and more effectively assessing impacts on adaptive capacity. All stakeholders agreed that conversion from flood irrigation to drip irrigation system is the only solution to the irrigation water deficit partly caused by the observed climate changes. The stakeholder analysis identified that all the primary stakeholders of the adaptation project were also experiencing non-monetary welfare gains, as is commonly observed in adaptation projects that aim to build adaptive capacity.
Some groups of private and public stakeholders favoured these non-monetary gains over the monetary ones, with small-scale farmers the most reliant on the non-monetary benefits of adaptation. The majority of farmers were not aware of the non-monetary benefits of the drip irrigation system. The Regional Office of Agricultural Development in Tadla (ORMVAT) appreciated this new approach and confirmed that the results of the project will help to convince farmers who have not yet signed up to this project.