��������

In North Africa, the consequences of a warming planet are no longer a distant threat. They have morphed into a relentless burden on fragile economies and fragile governance systems.
Across the Maghreb and the Nile Valley, rising temperatures, erratic rainfalls, and dwindling groundwater reserves are destroying the pillars of food and water security. What was once an ecological challenge that puzzled governments has become a fast-growing fiscal crisis in which every year of delay adds more zeros to the cost of survival.
The numbers are damning. Africa already loses between 2 and 5 percent of gross domestic product each year to climate extremes, and diverts nearly 10 percent of national budgets to emergency responses.
In North Africa, which is warming at a rate of about 0.4 degrees Celsius each decade, the fastest rate on the continent, the situation is even more harrowing. By 2030, as many as 118 million people could be exposed to drought, floods, and extreme heat, at a time when the region’s cereal output is already 10 percent below its five-year average.
Agriculture, in particular, remains both a lifeline and a liability. It consumes more than 80 percent of available fresh water and employs millions across the region, yet remains perilously rain-fed and inefficient.
Flood irrigation, still dominant in Egypt’s Nile Delta and Sudan’s Gezira Scheme, wastes up to half the water applied, and accelerates soil salinization. Modern alternatives, such as drip or center-pivot systems, could cut water use by 30 to 60 percent and boost yields by up to 50 percent, but cost remains the main barrier. After all, small-scale farmers, often earning less than $3 a day, cannot afford either without state or international support.
The irony is cruel. The technologies that could save water and stabilize rural incomes remain out of reach because the very scarcity they are meant to resolve has already hollowed out the fiscal space. The consequences of this Catch-22 situation can be felt throughout the region’s economies: droughts slash crop yields, trigger food imports, and drain foreign reserves.
In Morocco, water stress has forced the diversion of funds from education and health to subsidize grain imports. Egypt’s dependence on wheat imports, about 12 million tonnes a year, exposes it to global shocks and currency volatility; a $1 increase in global wheat prices translates to about $400 million in additional import costs for Cairo.
As a result, rising food prices and water shortages end up rewriting social contracts, eroding trust in governments embattled by debt, unemployment, and political discontent.
Worse yet, geopolitical shocks are further complicating these challenges. The abrupt suspension of US foreign aid this year has gutted critical food and water initiatives across North Africa.
Programs such as the US Department of Agriculture’s Food for Progress, which provided agricultural commodities worth more than $200 million to Egypt, Sudan, and Tunisia between 2018 and 2024, were canceled. UNICEF’s WASH programs are facing funding cuts of 20 percent, leaving millions at risk of losing access to clean water and sanitation. 

North Africa’s predicament is a warning and an opportunity; scarcity is unforgiving but it also clarifies priorities.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

The results of such losses go beyond immediate threats of hunger and disease. They also erode human capital, undermine productivity, and raise long-term fiscal liabilities that dwarf any short-term savings from the withdrawal of aid.
Meanwhile, the hydrological calculus only grows uglier by the day. Nonrenewable groundwater in Libya and Algeria, for instance, is being drained much faster than it can be replenished, with extraction rates up to 10 times the natural recharge capacities. Once these reserves are exhausted, no amount of desalination will fill the gap quickly enough.
Yet desalination remains one of the few scalable short-term lifelines. Morocco and Egypt are leading the investments in this space, with Egypt alone planning to produce nearly 8 million cubic meters of desalinated water daily by 2030. The capital costs of this, estimated at $3.5 billion, are high but the returns are tangible: each cubic meter of desalinated water used for irrigation saves about 1.5 kg of imported grain, avoiding about $400 a year in import costs per hectare.
In addition, we cannot sideline the ways in which climate extremes are upending the food-energy-water nexus in the region. Ambitious green-hydrogen projects in Egypt, Morocco, and Mauritania are designed to help diversify economies and attract billions in investment but they are water-intensive in nature: production of 1 kg of hydrogen consumes about a liter of fresh water.
Unless integrated water-management frameworks are enforced, the rush for green energy could cannibalize agricultural and municipal supplies, creating a new cycle of scarcity disguised as progress.
The creeping human cost is less visible but just as corrosive. As rural livelihoods collapse, migration toward cities accelerates. This exodus drains agricultural labor pools and inflates urban unemployment.
In Egypt, more than 55 percent of rural youth now aspire to leave farming altogether, citing unreliable incomes and water shortages. This loss of rural labor not only depresses food outputs, it fuels social fragility as urban centers struggle to absorb displaced populations. As this unfolds, it risks turning environmental stress into political volatility.
Yet amid the crises there are some low-hanging fruits of opportunity. Precision agriculture can reduce fertilizer waste and optimize irrigation at minimal cost. Shifting to drought-tolerant crops such as olives, legumes, and grapes could reduce water demand by up to 40 percent while sustaining export revenues.
The costs of such adaptations, estimated at $20 billion-$25 billion for the region over the next decade, pale in comparison to the projected $70 billion in annual losses from drought, land degradation, and food import dependency as a result of inaction.
Even modest policy coordination among Maghreb states, such as joint desalination projects, seed banks, and shared data on aquifer depletion, could save billions by avoiding duplication and scaling up resilience.
Ultimately, the question for North Africa is not whether it can afford climate adaptation, but whether it can afford not to invest in it. The region’s food and water security are already bleeding money, stability, and credibility. The cost of prevention is measurable, the cost of collapse is not. The false economy of delay, of hoping for a return to some kind of “normality,” is now the most expensive policy choice of all.
A credible regional vision must therefore go beyond emergency measures. Governments need to treat food and water resilience as strategic assets, not welfare programs. Subsidies should shift from consumption to efficiency, rewarding conservation and innovation rather than overuse.
International partners, particularly multilateral lenders and climate funds, must channel adaptation finance directly into infrastructure and governance reforms that can close the gap between rural needs and fiscal capacities.
North Africa’s predicament is a warning and an opportunity; scarcity is unforgiving but it also clarifies priorities. Water, food, and stability are now the same currency. The region can either count the cost now, or face a future in which a bigger bill comes due in terms of hunger, migration, and conflict.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
X: @HafedAlGhwell