In 2023, General Michael E. Langley, the Commander of U.S. Africa Command, warned that African countries face new destabilizing challenges, including “climate change [that] is increasing desertification.” One year earlier, Morocco, a close US ally on the northwestern edge of the Sahara Desert, had already started taking bold steps to get ahead of the negative effects of climate change. In particular, it began building a series of dams to better manage its increasingly precarious water resources. Scheduled for completion between 2026 and 2029, the dams will lessen the impact of more frequent and more violent floods, and they will allow Morocco to adapt to longer and more acute droughts. However, while the dams proactively mitigate the risks climate change poses to Morocco’s domestic stability, they are catalysts for broader regional destabilization.
One of the dams, and its projected 35 billion cubic feet reservoir, is only 19 miles from Morocco’s border with Algeria. The watershed filling the reservoir flows southeasterly, not further into Morocco but away from it and across the border into nearby Algeria. While the dam will safeguard Moroccan communities’ water supplies, it will cut off water for more than 300,000 Algerians just on the other side of the border.
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