Abstract :
[en] Morocco, by its geographical position and its climate, is strongly affected by climate change and
presents an ever-increasing vulnerability. In fact, the country's economy, being very dependent on
agriculture, would be greatly affected. It is therefore necessary to further develop knowledge
about climate change and strengthen forcasting systems for predicting the impacts of climate
change.
The agriculture in Morocco is largely dominated by rainfed crops and therefore dependent on
pluviometry. According to the Global Yield Gap Atlas, about 43% of arable land is devoted to
cereals, 7% to plantation crops (olives, almonds, citrus, grapes, dates), 3% to pulses, 2% to forage,
2% to vegetables, 2% to industrial crops (sugar beets, sugar cane, cotton) and oilseeds, and 42% is
fallow. In this project we are going to focus on cereals, olives, potatoes and sugar beets. Regarding
the climate, Morocco is characterized by a wide variety of topographies ranging from mountains to
plains, oasis and Saharan dunes. For this reason, the country experiences diverse climatic
conditions with large spatial and intra- and inter-annual variability of precipitation. Morocco faces
irregular rain patterns, cold spells and heat waves increasingly resulting in droughts, which
significantly affects agriculture.
Our research, funded by a bilateral project of Wallonie-Bruxelles International, aims to study the
response of Moroccan agriculture to climate change, using the dynamic vegetation model CARAIB
(CARbon Assimilation In the Biosphere) developed within the Unit for Modelling of Climate and
Biogeochemical Cycles (UMCCB) of the University of Liège. This spatial model includes crops and
natural vegetation and may react dynamically to land use changes. Originally constructed to study
vegetation dynamics and carbon cycle, it includes coupled hydrological, biogeochemical,
biogeographical and fire modules. These modules respectively describe the exchange of water
between the atmosphere, the soil and the vegetation, the photosynthetic production and the
evolution of carbon stocks and fluxes in this vegetation-soil system. The biogeographical module
describes, for natural vegetation, the establishment, growth, competition, mortality, and
regeneration of plant species, as well as the occurrence and propagation of fires. For crops, a
specific module describes basic management (sowing, harvest, rotation) and phenological phases.
Model simulations are performed across north-west Morocco, where the crops activities are
important, by using different input data. The timeline of simulations is divided in two periods: past
(from 1901 to 2018[LF1] ) and future (from 2019 to 2100). For the past period, we are using high
resolution (30 arc sec) gridded climate data derived from WorldClim (climatology) and interpolated
anomalies from Climate Research Unit CRU (trend and variability). For the future period, we use
interpolated and bias-corrected fields from a regional climate model (ALADIN-Climate) from the
Med-CORDEX initiative run at a spatial resolution of 12 km and for three different Representative
Concentration Pathway scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5).
