Climate Change Disrupts Moroccan Nomads’ Lifestyle

Rabat – Faced with serve droughts, many Moroccan nomads have decided to give up on their lifestyle to survive.

The situation of Moroccan nomads made international headlines recently.

In an interview, Moroccan Amazigh nomad Moha Ouchaali talked about his experience, stressing that “everything has changed” as “water has become hard to find [and] temperatures are going up and the drought is so harsh.”

As climate change makes the nomads’ search for water for their livestock harder day after day, the Moroccan nomads have to constantly adapt their itineraries to survive and some of the younger generations have opted to settle in urban spaces.

“Before, we managed to live decently, but all these droughts, more and more intense, make our lives complicated,” Ouchaali’s wife Ida told AFP. Living in a tent near Amellagou village, approximately 280 kilometers from Marrakech, Ida acknowledged that water scarcity made their lives exhausting.

“Without water we can’t do anything.”

As Morocco experienced this year its worst drought in three decades, some of the nomads had to take loans to feed their livestock.

“I’ve gone into debt to buy food for my animals so they don’t starve to death,” Ahmed Assni, another nomad said.

While the Ait Aissa Izem nomads used to spend their summer in the cool mountain valley in Imchil before heading to Errachidia for the winter, climate change has made their traditional plans “ancient history,” said Ouchaali.

“Today we go wherever there’s a bit of water left, to try to save the animals,” he argued.

Moroccan nomadic population has shrunk over the past decades to reach 25,000 in 2014. Climate change is triggering the abolishment of nomads’ traditions and lifestyles.

With the Moroccan nomads struggling to maintain their lifestyle while supporting their livestock, global forecasts have reported that climate migration is expected to impact between 50 million and 300 million across the world.

A 2018 World Bank report titled “Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration” further confirmed the forecasts and called for urgent national and global climate action in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

By 2050, experts expect more than 140 million people to migrate within the three regions due to a decrease in crop productivity, water shortage, and rising sea levels.

While internal migration was often related to job search or war and conflict, climate migration is set to become the new norm as more communities are getting impacted by severe droughts, rising temperatures, storms, floods, and hurricanes.