Morocco Ranks 6th for Climate. Its Wells Are Running Dry

I'm filming this from Morocco, halfway through a two-week family trip with Intrepid Travel. And what I'm hearing from farmers, guides, and rural communities out here is stopping me cold.

Morocco is responsible for 0.18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Less than two-tenths of one percent of the problem. It ranks 6th in the global Climate Change Performance Index, ahead of most of Europe. And yet it has just come through six years of protracted drought, its driest year in eight decades, and per capita water availability has collapsed from 2,500 cubic metres per person in the 1960s to under 600 today. The international scarcity threshold is 1,000.

In this video I cover what Morocco is actually doing on climate, which is genuinely impressive; what is happening to rural smallholder communities who depend on rainfed agriculture with no safety net or subsidy; the structural inequality underneath the headlines, including water-intensive export crops expanding while wells run dry; and what all of this means for the businesses we work with at 51toCarbonZero.

Average cereal yields fell by nearly 40% in drought years. The World Bank projects 1.9 million people will migrate from rural to urban areas by 2050. That migration has already started. We're driving through villages where it is visible.

The organisations we work with that take carbon strategy seriously are making a material difference to that trajectory. Not as a moral gesture. Because cumulative emissions have cumulative costs, and those costs land on specific people in specific places.

If you want to understand what net zero actually means beyond the reporting framework, this is a good place to start.

Find out more about how we work with organisations at https://www.51tocarbonzero.com Explore our referral programme for sustainability professionals: https://www.51tocarbonzero.com/referral/

#ClimateChange #NetZero #Sustainability #CarbonAccounting #ClimateJustice