The World Water Forum is the world’s largest water-related event. It takes place every three years and brings together key political actors, business leaders, NGOs, donors and international organizations to promote dialogue and facilitate access to water and sanitation.
This year’s Forum, whose theme is “Water Security for Peace and Development”, was jointly organized by the World Water Council (WCW) and the Government of Senegal. The Forum provides a unique platform for the water community and key decision makers to collaborate and achieve long-term progress on global water challenges. The WWC, notably through the organization of the World Water Forums, has strongly contributed to making water a global political priority.
Several thousand public and private players in the water and sanitation sector from all over the world, including several heads of state and ministers, met in Dakar during the 9e Global Forum. This edition is held exactly twenty-five years following the first edition in Marrakech. After several exchanges and consultation sessions, the forum adopted the “Dakar declaration”, which calls for the adoption of the right to drinking water.
This 9th edition focused on four priorities: 1) water security and sanitation; 2) cooperation; 3) water for rural development; 4) means and tools for the implementation of reforms in the field of water and sanitation. The forum also recommended the establishment of “sustainable and integrated management plans to preserve water resources and ecosystems” by mobilizing the financial resources necessary to preserve access to drinking water for the populations. Water governance, as mentioned in the context of the forum, has a multisectoral dimension that includes all the actors in the water chain: the agricultural, industrial, health, biodiversity, energy sectors, etc.
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In Morocco, access to drinking water in rural areas reached 97% in 2018. This performance does not in any way reduce the impact of water stress on the country. Morocco is expected to face significant water scarcity due to increased water demand and reduced rainfall induced by climate change. Over the past 30 years, a drought has occurred on average every 3 years in Morocco, creating volatility in agricultural production which is the main constraint to the expansion of the sector. Moroccans only have access to 600 cubic meters of water per person per year, far less than the 2,600 cubic meters they enjoyed in the 1960s.
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Dwindling water reserves in Morocco are the result of a combination of environmental factors, high demand, and overexploitation of groundwater for agriculture. In a recent report for the Moroccan Institute for Political Analysis, Amal Ennabih mentions that “water scarcity in Morocco is deeply linked to the way water is used for irrigation, which consumes regarding 80% of the water from Morocco every year”.
The kingdom, with its Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, hopes desalination plants can help fill the gap, although they are energy-intensive and pump brine into the sea, which poses its own environmental problems.