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Integration of Climate Information for Sustainable Drought Management in Morocco: Towards Resilient Strategies in a Changing Climate

IWRA World Water Congress 2025 Marrakech Morocco
Water Governance, Financing, and Planning during Uncertainty
Author(s): Meriem Alaouri¹, Riad Balaghi², Mouanis Lahlou³
Meriem Alaouri¹, Riad Balaghi², Mouanis Lahlou³
¹Direction Générale de la Météorologie (DGM),
²Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA),
³Institut Agronomique et Vétérinaire Hassan II (IAV Hassan II)

Poster: PDF

Abstract

Morocco is facing growing hydro-climatic pressure, with declining rainfall, rising temperatures, and increasingly frequent multi-year droughts placing major stress on water resources, agriculture, and rural livelihoods. Effective drought management today requires climate information that goes beyond historical averages and provides spatially explicit, real-time indicators.

CGMS-Morocco was initially developed with national agricultural partners under the E-Agri programme (E-Agri: Crop Monitoring as an E-Agriculture Tool in Developing Countries) to support cereal yield forecasting and agricultural drought monitoring. As the system evolved, its high-resolution, daily climate grids (precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, NDVI, and soil-moisture indicators) proved equally valuable for basinlevel water diagnostics, rainfall deficit assessment, and hydro-climatic monitoring.

Integrating multisource climate information has allowed CGMS-Morocco to become a national decision-support system linking climate data, water resources management, and agriculture in a context of accelerating climate vulnerability