Abstract

Agricultural development plays an important role in the economies of the Mediterranean African Countries. Food demand is increasing in the Mediterranean African Countries and consumption patterns are changing. The countries face common challenges in their strategy to improve food security. The most significant challenges are a rapid population growth, urbanisation, dependency on rainfed agriculture with fluctuating yields, water scarcity, increased water demands, and challenges in water quality. Water scarcity has reached a critical point in the region, and the dependency on rainfall makes the Mediterranean African Countries extra vulnerable to climate changes. The Mediterranean African Countries offers plenty of opportunities for agricultural development: Availability of arable land, a temperate Mediterranean climate with year-round production possibilities, and a growing consumer market. A number of different efforts had been made in the past to quantify the Water Stress and Water Vulnerability in the past. Within this study, the 2016 AWDO framework had been used to allow a more consistent comparison of information both with previous and forthcoming international studies. Water Security and Water Vulnerability are considered as interrelated terms, where the one is the inverse of the other. Water Security had however gained over the recent decades a more prominent standing in the international community or donors, scientists, and policy makers. Depicting Water Security leads inevitably to the question, “security for whom”? The 2016 AWDO framework was developed within the Asian Water Development Outlook to offer a consistent approach for the Household Water Security, the Economic Water Security, the Urban Water Security, the Environmental Water Security and the Resilience to Water Related Disasters, referred to as the five key dimensions. By this the framework follows the classical People, Planet, and Profit paradigm as being applied in determining the sustainable development while adding a special focus on the urban situation and water risks. The full AWDO 2016 framework requires a rather large amount of data. Concentrating on the dimension of the Economic Water Security offers instead a good trade off, allowing to reduce the number of input data while at the same time providing a sufficient diversity in the consideration of other sectors. In this view, the Economic Water Security as defined in the 2016 AWDO framework has been used to determine relevant aspects for the Water Security in Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. Water Stress is considered as the ratio of Total Withdrawal over Total Renewable Freshwater Resources. A nested framework had been applied to depict first the Water Stress and other key information on the water resource availability for all river basins in Tunisia and Morocco as well as for the different irrigation areas in Egypt. The related results had been then aggregated at national scale in order to calculate the Economic Water Security Index at national scale under the use of further socio-economic statistics. This aggregation had been necessary as the requested socio-economic background information could not been provided at the scale of river basins (Morocco, Tunisia) or irrigation areas in Egypt. In order to depict possible changes as a result of climate change and an increase in consumption, climate model ensemble runs from the CORDEX data base have been used to elaborate future aspects on the availability of water resources on the scale of catchments and in the case of Egypt on the irrigation areas instead. The results of this analysis are suited to provide a detailed insight on spatial variations of Water Stress. There is a high variability of rainfall in the coastal areas of Morocco, distinct north south variations of water availability in Tunisia, and a comparable uniform situation in Egypt because of distributing the Nile water in irrigation channels up to the Nile river delta. The score of the 2016 AWDO Economic Water Security is not affected by weighting factors and the results of the study allow hence a comparison amongst the countries. Additionally, the results underline possible pathways to use selected indicators of the AWDO framework as so called anchor indicators and to route relevant insights across the scales. Future effort should be spent to investigate further the possible effects from the aggregation process and to which extend the framework is suited to reflect pilots for introducing wastewater adequately. For determining the wastewater reuse potentials in irrigation, different maps have been elaborated for Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. As a result, priority areas are highlighted, where the close vicinity of wastewater production and existing of irrigated areas would favour interventions to implement wastewater reuse schemes. The findings of this study indicate the added value of applying elements from the 2016 AWDO Framework to allow a systematic reflection and comparison of key information to characterise water stress and Water Security.