Climate Change and Agricultural Production in Morocco

Natural resources are essential to the livelihoods of Morocco's poor. Since the 1960s, the average increase in observed temperatures is 0.23°C per decade; nine of the country's 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the past two decades, and precipitation follows a general downward trend. Faced with such observations, this article seeks to determine whether this ongoing climate change has concrete effects on the four main agricultural productions in Morocco. Thus, using the Pettitt test to estimate the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and the evolution of seasonal average temperatures, the study of the Spearman correlation coefficients between these parametric variations of climate change and the yields of four main agricultural productions during the period 2001-2020 did not reveal a significant link, with the exception of cereal yield during the 5 years of severe drought. This resilience can be explained by the intervention of public policies to promote technology, seeds and irrigation to counteract the degradation of climatic factors.