Economic-Engineering Optimization to Assess Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture in Morocco

摘要

Economic ideas and processes are becoming increasingly integrated with more traditional engineering and hydrologic models of water management problems. Combining economic management concepts and performance indicators with an engineering-level of understanding of a hydrologic system can provide results and insights more directly relevant for water management decisions and policies. This research presents a mathematical model of the Ait Ben Yacoub Region (Morocco), elaborated for the first time, to assess potential effects of climate change on irrigated agriculture and resources water. The novelty of the approach lies in the capacity of this integrated framework to take into consideration agronomic, socio-economic and hydrologic systems in a spatially-explicit manner covering all dimensions and scales relevant to climate change. This model simulates the behavior of farmers in response to a severe climate change scenario A2 up to 2050 (IPCC). The results of simulation show that climate change may will reduce considerably the availability of water resources and will reduce also crop yields (between 2 and 10) and increase irrigation water requirements. The resulting changes of water stress, crop yields and crop competitiveness will drive changes of crop land allocations. The cultivated area will decrease significantly by 45. The model results demonstrate also that climate change will produce significant reductions of the region's income by 13 and the small farms will be more vulnerable to this reduction in income. The model and the results constitutes a real tool for preparing actions and strategies to reduce the potential negative impacts of climate change that can be taken by decision makers in the region and nationality.