El Hafidi, who was speaking on Tuesday at a forum organized by Morocco’s Liaison Office in Israel and the Center for Jewish Impact on the issue of water as a component of regional cooperation between Morocco and Israel, added that the major challenge for Morocco in strengthening its water security is to develop a new model for managing water scarcity.
He pointed out that Morocco, which has made great efforts in surface water management, has 152 dams with a huge storage capacity of around 20 billion cubic meters, explaining that due to climate change, a precise view of each year’s rainfall is no longer available, and the situation has become more complicated over the last five years with last year’s recording of a water deficit estimated at around 85%.
He noted that this has necessitated the adoption of a new approach to dealing with water scarcity, irrespective of the constraints posed by climate change and the availability of surface water, by resorting to desalination plants, underlining that a huge amount of work is being done by ONEE to find alternative solutions.
To date, nine seawater desalination plants have been completed, while a major seawater desalination plant will soon be launched in Casablanca, said El Hafidi, underlining that this new management model would make it possible to deal effectively with water shortages and ensure national water security in the long term, independently of surface water.
For his part, Abderrahim Bayoudh, Head of Morocco’s Liaison Office in Israel, said the forum comes at a critical time when countries in the region are increasingly facing severe drought and water scarcity, combined with the challenges of global climate change, noting that Morocco is facing its worst drought in over three decades.
Noam Weisbrod, an expert at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, pointed out that Morocco’s water problems are similar to those experienced by Israel in the past, before the completion of desalination plants, which now supply 80% of drinking water with a production capacity of around 600 million cubic meters per year, rising to around 900 million cubic meters per year by 2025.
