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This week @everydayclimatechange will share @jameswhitlowdelano’s series, “Morocco’s Climate Crisis: A Rising Tide of Saharan Sands is Burying the Last Drought-Stricken Oasis in the Valley of Draa.”
“There used to be houses and green fields here”, Mohammed Hamouisi says, looking out over dead and dying date palms sticking up out of wind-driven sand dunes that accumulate against low mudbrick walls that once demarcated irrigated fields.
“The date palms began to die when the sand started to pile up in the 1990’s”, he continued, “because there was only enough water to raise crops in fewer and fewer fields”.
Palmeraie occupy the Oued Draa, a seasonally flooded wadi draining the Atlas Mountains, for 200km from Agdz to M’Hamid, growing progressively drier the further they are from the source. Temperatures here are rising at twice the global average with summer temperatures sometimes exceeding 50C (122F).
Caption: Sands, buffeted by a Saharan gale, advance upon Zwaya, threatening to buried it in surging dunes, part of the oasis palmeraie of M'Hamid, Morocco.
#climatechange #climatecrisis #sahara #drought #Morocco #maghreb #northafrica
