In this episode, sustainability consultant Will Richardson reports from a family trip to Morocco, using interviews with local guides, farmers, and market traders to illustrate how the country’s impressive climate policy achievements clash with a severe water crisis. He outlines Morocco’s high ranking (6th) in the 2025 Climate Change Performance Index and its ambitious national targets—carbon neutrality by 2050, a 53 % emissions cut by 2035, coal phase‑out by 2040, and a tripling of renewable capacity to 15 GW by 2030. At the same time, the nation has endured a protracted drought (2019‑2023) with a 48 % rainfall deficit in 2023, per‑capita water availability falling from ~2,500 m³ in the 1960s to under 600 m³ today, and reservoirs at single‑digit capacity. The drought has devastated smallholder agriculture (which employs ~40 % of the workforce and contributes ~14 % of GDP), cutting cereal yields by nearly 40 % in severe years and prompting rural‑to‑urban migration. While smallholders suffer, large agribusinesses expand water‑intensive export crops such as avocados, and a 2024 water law shifts water supply toward private control. Richardson highlights structural inequities: climate finance gaps ($18 bn needed for unconditional measures), continued reliance on coal (>60 % of electricity), and limited local empowerment in policy design. He connects these observations to his work at 51 to Carbon Zero, arguing that corporate carbon‑strategy decisions directly affect vulnerable communities like those he meets. The episode also notes the role of Intrepid Travel’s B‑Corp model in enabling authentic, community‑based travel, the Moroccan king’s public climate messaging (e.g., urging abandonment of Eid al‑Adha sheep sacrifice), and youth climate engagement. The narrative ends with a call for business leaders to act on decarbonization, emphasizing that climate change is already a human problem for those who contributed little to emissions.
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Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. Before we get into this, I want to tell you something that stopped me cold this week. We're here in Morocco, halfway through a 2-week family trip, and I've been asking local people— guides, farmers, market traders, guesthouse owners— one simple question: what's changed in the last 10 years? Almost every single one of them says the same thing. Not politics, not the economy. Water. The wells are running dry. The seasons have shifted. The rains don't come the way they used to. And here's the thing: Morocco is responsible for 0.18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, less than 2 tenths of 1% of the problem, but it is already living some of the most severe consequences of it. That is what I want to talk about today. The trip, Intrepid, why we're here. So let me give you some context. We're traveling with Intrepid Travel. If you don't know them, they're a B Corp and one of the few travel companies where that certification actually means something. It runs through how they are— they choose local guides. Where the money goes, how they structure every part of the experience. It's not a badge, it's the business model. And what's that— what that means in practice is that we're not in a resort bubble. We're in villages, riads, souks, mountain communities. We're eating with families, we're hearing real conversations. And I'm also doing what I always do. I can't switch off the sustainability lens. So while the kids are exploring, I'm cross-referencing what I'm hearing with what the data actually says. The 2 things match almost perfectly, and that is both reassuring because it means the research is grounded in reality and deeply uncomfortable because the reality is stark. Let me start with what, what Morocco is doing right. Because it deserves credit. Morocco currently ranks 6th in the 2025 Climate Change Performance Index. That puts it above most of Europe, above Germany, above France. For a country at its income level, that is a genuinely extraordinarily good performance. The government has committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. It published a new NDC in September 2025, setting a 53% emission reduction target for 2035. It has, for the first time, set a date for phasing out coal, 2040, and it has pledged to triple its renewable energy capacity by 2030, from 5 gigawatts to 15. Wind and solar already supply nearly 25% of electricity here. Up from just 9% in 2015. That is a rapid shift. And politically, this is not just technocrats writing policy documents. In February 2025, the king directly addressed climate pressures when he urged Moroccans to forego the traditional Eid al-Adha sheep sacrifice because of drought and livestock shortages. Think about what that means. A head of state asking the population to change a centuries-old religious tradition because of climate stress. You do not do that unless the situation is genuinely serious. But here's where the picture gets much harder. Morocco has just come through a protracted drought that ran from 2019 In 2023, the country recorded a rainfall deficit of 48%, the driest year in 8 decades. Per capita water availability has fallen from around 2,500 cubic meters per person per year in the 1960s to under 600 today. The internationally recognized water scarcity threshold is 1,000 cubic meters. Morocco passed that threshold years ago. It is now approaching what experts call absolute water scarcity: 500 cubic meters per person per year. We're seeing this on the road. Riverbeds that locals tell us ran year-round just 10 or 15 years ago are dry. Or if in trickle. Reservoirs at a fraction of their capacity. One major dam was reportedly at just 3% of its capacity in early 2024. The government's own budget planning document for 2024 to 2026 explicitly flags climate disruption as a fiscal risk. They've calculated that under a high warming scenario, GDP per capita could fall by 1.3% by 2050. That might sound modest. It isn't. For a country where agriculture employs 40% of the workforce, and most of that is smallholder farming of rain-fed lands. Average temperatures across Morocco have already risen by 1.7 degrees Celsius between 1971 and 2017. That is not a projection. That has already happened. Now, here is what all of that means for ordinary people, because this is the part that doesn't make it into the NDC documents. Agriculture accounts for around 14% of Morocco's GDP. It employs roughly 40% of the workforce nationally, and in rural areas, over 60% of people depend directly on it for their livelihoods. Most of those people are smallholders farming less than 5 hectares, almost entirely on rain-fed land, meaning no irrigation, no backup. When the rains don't come, the crops don't grow, and there is no safety net, no meaningful subsidy, no drought insurance, no support structure. Average cereal yields Yields fell by nearly 40% during the severe drought years of 2016 and 2020. Nearly 40%! Imagine your income dropping by 40% in a single year with nothing to fall back on. One of our guides here, whose family is from a rural community in the Atlas region, has been describing this to me over the last few days. He talks about watching his parents' village Slowly empty. Young people leave first because there is nothing to stay for when the land stops producing. Older farmers hang on as long as they can, digging wells deeper, trying to find water that is no longer here. The World Bank projects that climate change will drive 1.9 million people from rural to urban areas in Morocco by 2050. But that migration is not a future event. It is happening right now. We are driving through villages where it is visible. And when those people move to the cities, they move into already stained infrastructure. Casablanca, Marrakesh, Rabat. The cities are growing faster than the systems that support them, and the rural communities left behind are hollowing out. Here is where this gets genuinely complicated, and I think it's important to say it clearly. While smallholder farmers are watching their water disappear, large agribusiness operations are expanding production of water-intensive crops for exports. Morocco produced around 40,000 tons of avocados this year. A single avocado requires approximately 320 liters of water to grow, and production is on track to triple to 100,000 tons by 2027. This is not a fringe issue. Environmental groups have been calling on the government to stop expanding water-intensive export crops in regions already facing critical water stress. So far, the economic logic of export revenue is winning. The Green Morocco Plan, which was Morocco's big agricultural modernization program, was marketed as a way to reduce rural poverty, create a smallholder middle class, and anchor communities in their areas. What the research shows is different. Over 80% of agricultural land owned by small farmers remained outside the plan. The financial and technical support went primarily to large landowners with agribusiness investors. And in 2024, a new water law effectively privatized water supply. A farmers union representative I've been reading about described it this way: Before we could negotiate with the state, now we have to deal with private companies. Before water was a public service, now it is merchandised. This is the structural pattern underneath all the headline climate ambition. The costs of climate change fall hardest on the people with the least power to avoid them. The economic gains flow to those best positioned to extract them. Morocco is not unique in this, but it is a very clear example of it. I want to be fair here because Morocco's government is genuinely trying to— trying in ways that many governments are not The renewable energy program is real. The NDC commitments are serious. The King speaking publicly about climate impacts, including in the ways that intersect with faith and culture, reflects genuine political will at the top. The Parliament has been engaging with climate through work supported by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. There is a Moroccan youth negotiation— negotiators Council that organized a Pan-African Youth Climate Conference in 2024, bringing together 250 young people from 45 countries. Climate is in the political conversation, but the government's gap between national ambition and local delivery is significant. Research involving field interviews with farmers, activists, scientists across Morocco is consistent on this. The people bearing the cost have very little voice in the decisions being made about how to respond. Local-level empowerment is almost entirely absent from the policy architecture, and the finance problem is real. Morocco's conditional NDC targets, the more ambitious ones, depend on international climate finance arriving. The estimated cost of unconditional measures alone is $18 billion. A country at Morocco's income level simply cannot fund that from domestic resources. So when wealthy countries fall short on climate finance commitments, it is not an abstract disappointment. It is a direct constraint on what Morocco can actually do. Coal still generates more than 60% of Morocco's electricity. The phase-out target of 2040 is a genuine step forward, but getting there requires support that has not yet materialized at the scale needed. Now, let me bring this back to something I think about every day in my work at 51 to Carbon Zero, because this is not just a story about Morocco. Morocco contributes 0.18% of global emissions. The communities we're visiting have contributed almost nothing to the carbon in the atmosphere, and yet they are absorbing consequences that are reshaping their economy, their migration patterns, their access to water, and their ability to feed themselves. Every large organization, every FTSE-listed business, every major food and beverage company, every media group that has not yet properly measured and begun reducing its emissions is contributing to a carbon budget that makes outcomes like this more likely. And more severe. This is not about guilt. It is about understanding the actual cost-benefit calculation. When businesses delay on decarbonization, Those costs don't disappear. They transfer. They transfer onto communities like the ones I'm watching right now from this, well, proverbial car window. The organizations we work with at 51 to Carbon Zero that take this seriously, that build real carbon strategies rather than offsetting their way to a press release, are making a material difference to that trajectory. That is not marketing language. That is a straightforward description of how cumulative emissions work. I'm going to spend the rest of this trip paying attention, asking questions, listening to what people here are telling us. Morocco is a fascinating country with a real heart, genuinely one of the most extraordinary places I've ever visited. The landscape, the culture, the warmth of the people we're meeting. It's been one of those trips that shifts something. And being here with my family, seeing the reality that climate change does to people who did not cause it, makes the work feel more urgent than any report or dataset ever could. Climate change is not a policy problem. It is a human problem, and it is already here. If you want to follow more from the ground this week, I'm posting as we go. And if you're a business leader thinking about what your organization's carbon strategy actually means in the real world, come and find us at 51 to Carbon Zero. This is exactly why it matters. More soon.
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