Water Scarcity in Morocco: A Multivariate Analysis of Climatic, Agricultural, and Socioeconomic Drivers

Water Scarcity in Morocco: A Multivariate Analysis of Climatic, Agricultural, and Socioeconomic Drivers ABSTRACT Morocco's renewable freshwater per capita fell from roughly 2,560 m³ per year in 1960 to about 620 m³ in 2020, well inside the United Nations' absolute water-scarcity threshold. Internal renewable water resources stood at 777 m³ per capita in 2022, and the national water-stress index reached 50.75% that year. This study asks how three classes of drivers (climatic, agricultural, and socioeconomic) relate to the trajectory of national freshwater withdrawals between 2000 and 2025. It uses five publicly available World Bank indicators, supplemented by national indicators from Morocco's 2025 State of the Environment Report. The analysis is exploratory and associational. It is not designed to establish causal attribution, and its conclusions should be read as hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory. KEY FINDINGS 1. Per-capita renewable water fell by roughly three-quarters between 1960 and 2020 (≈2,560 → ≈620 m³/yr). 2. Agriculture absorbs about 88% of total water allocation, against 11% for drinking water and 1% for industry and tourism. 3. National freshwater withdrawals fell from 12.60 to 10.573 billion m³ (2000 → 2010) and were reported at that level through 2022, even as cereal yield rose from 366.8 to 1,240.1 kg/ha. 4. An exploratory OLS model (2004–2019, n = 16) reaches R² = 0.812 (adjusted 0.744), but the design matrix condition number of about 78,500 signals severe multicollinearity. 5. Irrigated land and population growth are strongly inversely correlated (r = −0.89), so their effects cannot be separated in this dataset. 6. The 2025–2026 rainfall and dam-filling rebound is a short-term storage buffer, not a reversal of the long-run per-capita decline. METHODOLOGY OLS regression with full diagnostics (VIF, condition number, confidence intervals), pairwise Pearson correlation, descriptive statistics. Data: World Bank WDI (5 indicators, 2000–2025) + Morocco State of the Environment Report 2025. No imputation or interpolation. CONTENTS - water_scarcity_morocco.pdf (manuscript, 1.3 MB) - 7 figures (framework, workflow, indicators, matrix, OLS) - DATA/raw/worldbank_data.csv (World Bank WDI extract) - DATA/raw/fetch_worldbank_data.py (reproducible fetch script) - CITATION.cff (citation metadata) LICENSE - Code: MIT - Manuscript, figures, documentation: CC-BY-4.0 - Data: World Bank CC-BY-4.0 CITATION Baladi, S. (2026). Water Scarcity in Morocco: A Multivariate Analysis of Climatic, Agricultural, and Socioeconomic Drivers (Version 1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23884236 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23884236 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8903-0029 Website: https://mws-lab.netlify.app