Impact of Climate Change on Morocco’s Agricultural GDP

Climate change has been identified as a major challenge facing the world in the twenty-first century. The fact that the economies of developing countries depend on agriculture makes the effects of climate change even more pronounced. In Morocco, the rate of growth is closely linked to the rate of agricultural production. Our study is related to the impact of climate change on the Moroccan agricultural sector. The analysis covers the period 1966 to 2021 in order to estimate the short and long-term impacts of climate change on agricultural GDP. In order to study the possible effects of climate change on the agricultural sector, the relationship between temperature, rainfall, CO2 emissions, and agricultural GDP was estimated using the cointegration model ARDL (autoregressive distributed lag). The empirical results show a positive and significant relationship between rainfall and agricultural GDP. However, the 1 °C increase in temperature has a negative impact on agricultural GDP with a decrease of 2.07% in the short term and 1.26% in the long term. In addition, the impact of CO2 emissions is estimated to be negative and statistically insignificant. This result may be due to the fact that carbon dioxide emissions in Morocco are low compared to industrialized countries. The findings confirm that climate change is negatively affecting Morocco’s agricultural sector.