Youssef Brouziyne

International Water Management Institute | IWMI

Citriculture is a primary agricultural product in Morocco, where water scarcity is a significant challenge exacerbated by climate change. This four-year study investigated the impact of deficit (50% of crop evapotranspiration, ETc) and excessive (150% ETc, and 200% ETc) irrigation on Esbal clementine quality in the Souss-Massa region of Morocco. Fo...

The Souss-Massa basin in central-western Morocco is of substantial economic potential, driven by natural resources, agriculture, fishing, and tourism, which heavily affects water resources in the region. Here, we present a comprehensive review of scientific research conducted over the past three decades, focusing on water resources and agricultural...

The sediment transport, involving the movement of the bedload and suspended sediment in the basins, is a critical environmental concern that worsens water scarcity and leads to degradation of land and its ecosystems. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have emerged as powerful tools for predicting sediment yield. However, their use by decision-makers...

Climate change significantly challenges the sustainability of forest ecosystems, with broad socio-ecological impacts insufficiently assessed. This study examines one such critical system, the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), focusing on preserving the Argan tree in the Ait Souab-Ait Mansour region of southern Morocco. The r...

Building policy coherence is significant in governing natural resources, especially in a changing climate and growing population. Designing and implementing coherent climate-adaptive water productivity policies through holistic and integrated knowledge could manage the growing demand for food and water, and sustain small-scale farmers’ livelihoods...

High costs associated with technology adoption can be a barrier against the improvement of water use in agriculture. Therefore, interventions must be not only technically feasible but also financially affordable and accessible to farmers. To understand the current situation of research in lowcost (and cost-effective) water solutions for effective m...

The Souss basin in Morocco is distinguished by an uneven surface water supply and steady overexploitation of groundwater resources. In recent years, the basin experienced constant disrupted water balance, due mostly to year-to-year variable weather conditions and rising water demand. This situation is projected to affect the region’s economic devel...

Africa is facing an urgent need to increase food production to meet increasing demands. Targeted investments in integrated agriculture and, water management systems are required to meet this challenge. However, there is a lack of comprehensive information on the potential applications of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). This paper reviews current c...

In the Maghreb, as in many arid and semi-arid zones, water resources are vulnerable to climatic variations, for which reason various scientific studies are being conducted in an attempt to face these changes while maintaining the yield potential of crops. The aim of the following paper is to evaluate the impact of continuous deficit irrigation (CDI...

Utilized the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) across different watershed scales, from small to large, under a variety of climate conditions, aiming to quantify and mitigate the impacts of climate change on watershed hydrology and water resources. Additionally, the paper explores the development of conservation strategies for water and soil, ai...

This innovation brief presents a methodology that was developed and empirically applied in Morocco to support the "setting up (of) a multiscale polycentric governance framework for promoting transformative adaptation options for climate change" as part of the overarching goal of Work Package #4 (WP4) of the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (a...

The concept of integrated water resource management requires an in-depth analysis of water inflows into a river basin. Population growth and the uncertainties associated with climate change are causing increased water stress and droughts, which are impacting agriculture. Hence the need for studies on the impact of climate change on demand-supply in...

There are calls for effective measures to address climate change challenges for socio-economic development. This is a critical review to take stock of the impacts of climate change, and some gains made by Morocco in adapting to and mitigating climate change. This also highlights the challenges and opportunities of addressing climate change. A revie...

North Africa is considered as the most vulnerable regions regarding climate change impacts. Providing data about the potential responses of hydrological processes to future extreme events (such as drought) will help in designing the fitting adaptation strategies. In this study, the Bouregreg watershed (BW) in Morocco was selected as a typical water...

This Study forms part of the research under Work Package #4 (WP4) of CGIAR Research Program: Building Systemic Resilience against Climate Variability and Extremes (ClimBeR). This research has the overarching goal of “setting up a bottom-up polycentric governance framework for promoting multiscale transformative adaptation options and targeted clima...

The demand for sustainable agricultural technologies still lags behind the supply confirming the demand articulation failure of transformational innovation change agricultural policies.To understand the reasons for demand shortcomings, the evaluation of developed policies is required. In the literature, there is little evidence on this topic, hence...

North Africa (NA) is supposed to lower emissions in its agriculture to honor climate action commitments and to impulse sustainable development across Africa. Agriculture in North Africa has many assets and challenges that make it fit to use the tools of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) for mitigation purposes. This study represents a first attempt t...

Water scarcity will be one of the main issues of the 21 st century, because of competing needs between civil, industrial, and agriculture use. While agriculture is the largest user of water, its share is bound to decrease as societies develop. Clearly, agriculture needs to become more water efficient. Improving water use efficiency (WUE) at the pla...

Water scarcity will be one of the main issues of the 21 st century, because of competing needs between civil, industrial, and agriculture use. While agriculture is the largest user of water, its share is bound to decrease as societies develop. Clearly, agriculture needs to become more water efficient. Improving water use efficiency (WUE) at the pla...

Unlabelled: The COVID-19 pandemic adds pressure on Africa; the most vulnerable continent to climate change impacts, threatening the realization of most Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The continent is witnessing an increase in intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, and environmental change. The COVID-19 was managed relatively wel...

An accurate estimate of crop coefficient (Kc) values at different development stages (Kcini, Kcmid, and Kcend) is crucial for assessing crop water requirements in semi-arid regions. The objectives of this study were first to quantify the reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and to calculate the actual evapotranspiration (ETa) over citrus in a semi-ar...

The overall objective of the proposed research is to develop an empirically applicable methodology for capturing and evaluating the critical linkages between the relative success of transformative adaptation options and their relative effectiveness as determined by the underlying institutions and infrastructures at various scales and contexts. The...

Africa emits the lowest amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the global GHG budget. However, the continent remains the most vulnerable continent to the effects of climate change. The agricultural sector in Africa is among the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. Also, as a dominant agricultural sector, African agriculture is increasingly c...

Dam safety assessment is important to implement the appropriate measures to avoid a dam break disaster as part of the water reservoirs management process. Prediction-based approaches are valuable to compare the actual measurements with the simulated values to proactively detect anomalies. However, the application of the conventional hydrostatic sea...

The water quality index is one of the prominent general indicators to assess and classify surface water quality, which plays a critical role in river water resources practices. This research constructs a hybrid artificial intelligence model namely sequen- tial minimal optimization-support vector machine (SMO-SVM) along with random forest (RF) as a...

Soil erosion has been severely affecting soil and water resources in semi-arid areas like the Mediterranean. In Morocco, this natural process is accelerated by anthropogenic activities, such as unsustainable soil management, overgrazing, and deforestation. With a drainage area of 395,600 ha, the Bouregreg River Watershed extends from the Middle Atl...

Improving the preparedness of agricultural systems to future climate-change-induced phenomena, such as drought-induced water stress, and the predictive analysis of their vulnerability is crucial. In this study, a hybrid modeling approach based on the SWAT model was built to understand the response of major crops and streamflow in the Bouregreg catc...

Across several coastal areas in Morocco, groundwater is the strategic source of irrigation. In this work, a database of thirteen Moroccan coastal aquifers was used to assess groundwater for agriculture purposes, as well as to highlight the process responsible of the degradation of groundwater resource quality in Moroccan coastal areas. According to...

Climate change adaptation and mitigating its adverse socioeconomic and environmental impacts have increased over the past few decades. New strategies to ensure a global stand against this imminent threat are debated and elaborated to decouple economic growth from intensive greenhouse gas-emitting industrial activities, agricultural practices, and o...

Most recent studies confirm a decreasing trend in water resources availability in the northern African region; the high competition between the sectors that use this vital resource, and the changing climate are considered as the main factors behind this situation. Under such very dynamic interactions between the natural resources, climate and the s...

In arid and semi-arid regions, evaporation from small irrigation reservoirs can be a significant source of water loss. Since groundwater is a major source of water supply for irrigation, evaporation losses from irrigation water reservoirs represent a challenging aspect in aquifers governance in such limited-water areas. Estimating these losses is c...

Water is a crucial resource for food production and its scarcity associated with frequent droughts has increased the need for a more efficient use of it along with new irrigation management technologies. This study addressed onion crop responses to continuous deficit irrigation with trigging thresholds of readily available water content. The experi...

Our study analyzes the vicious spiral between climate change impacts, agricultural practices, and adaptation choices to cope with the maladaptation residual risk. Therefore, the evolution of future agriculture will be shaped by its response to climate change. Our investigations argue for investment in ecosystem-based water management to increase th...

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of different restricted irrigation strategies on peach trees. Sustainable and regulated deficit irrigation treatments were applied during the 2018/2019 production season in a commercial plot of “Bénédicte” variety located at the Atlas Mountain’s region of Morocco. Five different treatments were te...

Moistube technology, widely known as nano-irrigation, is starting to gain popularity lately in Morocco compared to other buried irrigation systems made up of porous tubes. However, the technology remains unknown with installation difficulties for professionals, and only a few demonstration trials, and rarely scientific trials are conducted to demon...

During the last decades, the coastal areas of Morocco have witnessed an intense socioeconomic development associated with a continuous population growth and urban extension. This has led to an overexploitation of coastal aquifers leading to a degradation of their water quality. In order to obtain large scale overview on the quality status of Morocc...

Environmental flows are unanimously considered to be one of the most comprehensive indicators of the rivers health and their capacities to provide ecosystem goods and services. In this study, the objective was to predict the response of environmental flow components in a typical North African rivers network to future climate change. The study water...

In Morocco, Moistube technology (widely known as nano-irrigation) is starting to gain popularity compared to other types of porous tubes (PT). However, only a few trials (particularly demonstration and rarely scientific trials) are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the water use of the system. In 2020, the Regional Center of Agricultural R...

As the world looks forward to the new normal after the COVID-19 pandemic, reshaping the agricultural sector and food system is a high priority of most governments. This task is strategic for Morocco due to the vital socioeconomic role of this sector in the kingdom and because of the dual shocks that hit the sector during the 2019/2020 season. This...

In sub-Saharan Africa growing season precipitation is affected by climate change. Due to this, in Cameroon, it is uncertain how some crops are vulnerable to growing season precipitation. Here, an assessment of the vulnerability of maize, millet, and rice to growing season precipitation is carried out at a national scale and validated at four sub-na...

Groundwater level fluctuation is a nonlinear and non-stationary system as it depends on several factors in the time and space scales. Conceptual models require several physical parameters whose estimation is delicate in poorly monitored areas. However, data-based models may be valuable for modelling and forecasting groundwater level over short and...

Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be valuable for modelling the faecal contamination in the rivers to overcome the limitations of the process-based models. However, this approach requires large sufficient data for training and validation processes to avoid the over-fitting problem. This study attempts to overcome the small dataset limitation by...

Drought is a fundamental physical feature of the climate pattern worldwide. Over the past few decades, a natural disaster has accelerated its occurrence, which has significantly impacted agricultural systems, economies, environments, water resources, and supplies. Therefore, it is essential to develop new techniques that enable comprehensive determ...

The potential response of flow regimes to future climate has crucial importance for a variety of practical applications, such as sustainable water management and ecological asset preservation. For this study, multi-site investigations of alterations in flow regimes under projected climate change were performed for one of the largest watersheds in M...

Using conventional methods to evaluate the irrigation water quality is usually expensive and laborious for the farmers, particularly in developing countries. However, the applications of artificial intelligence models can overcome this issue through forecasting and evaluating the irrigation water quality indexes of aquifer systems using physical pa...

North Africa is considered among the most vulnerable regions regarding climate change impacts. Providing data about the potential responses of hydrological processes to future extreme events (such as drought) will help in designing the fitting adaptation strategies. In this study, Bouregreg watershed in Morocco was selected as a typical watershed r...

Reservoir sedimentation is a crucial challenge in planning and managing sustainable surface water resources in arid and semi-arid regions and must be assessed with accuracy. Both data-based models and conceptual models can be valuable tools for predicting reservoir sedimentation. In this study, we used an artificial neural network (ANN) approach an...

Globally, the Mediterranean region is considered among the most vulnerable regions to climate change impacts; This situation puts both agricultural and hydrological systems in this region at high risks. In addition to climate change, the projected development plans for this region are expected to increase the pressure on the agro-hydrological ecosy...

Precipitation changes and water use patterns are two factors affecting the water quantity; obviously, hydrologic processes are always linked to many elements in the watershed scale, so to understand water management issues it is fundamental to analyze the different elements of hydrologic processes occurring in the watershed. In this study, the “SWA...

Understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of future droughts is essential for effective water resource management, especially in the Mediterranean region where water resources are expected to be scarcer in the future. In this study, we combined meteorological and hydrological drought indices with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model...

Rainfed agriculture is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change. This situation is expected to worsen under most future climate projections, which might increase the risks linked to food security and economies which depend on it. Providing insights about the potential responses of rainfed crops to climate change will helps on designing fu...

Morocco is one of the countries who’s facing an insufficient water supply for irrigation, therefore it is seeking for new technologies allowing irrigation management evolution. Deficit irrigation is for this reason one of the recommended approaches to deal with this alarming situation. This study deals with the assessment of Sustainable Deficit Irr...

Climate change projections for the Mediterranean region are predicting a significant rainfall decrease and an increase of temperatures. The consequences of these changes on food security and natural resources in this region might be very dramatic. Anticipating climate change impacts by improving agricultural systems efficiency is a critical need....

Being a laborious approach, manual calibration of hydrologic model in a semi-arid context requires in-depth knowledge of the watershed and as much as possible field input data to obtain reliable simulations. In this study, manual calibration and relative sensitivity analysis approaches of the SWAT model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) were applied...

Being generally described as coherent entities in hydrological sense, watersheds are considered as study units to assess hydrological cycles and to come up with water management strategies. Hydrological modeling is a tool that can offer the chance to achieve these goals. The model Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been widely used in variou...