Advanced and emerging agricultural innovations for securing food, climate and ecosystems in Moroccan oasis

Abstract

In Morocco, oasis ecosystems cover 15% of country’s lands and are bright spots of rich biodiversity and multi-functionality but hot spots of land degradation, social vulnerability and water and food insecurity. Hence there is a need to shift from assessing risks and hazards in these ecosystems to effectively capture key drivers and pursue solutions and measures to reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive and productive capacity. In other terms, the food-environment dilemma requires urgently revitalizing these fragile agro-ecosystems in order to re-nurture the population, to strengthen society growth and food-related value chains and bring back resilience and sustainable development. In doing so, it is imperative to enforce, develop and encourage adoption of state of the art but adapted innovations and support knowledge sharing processes and approaches that drive implementation and up/deep scaling of innovations within ecosystems and by communities. A large array of innovations and technologies is emerging pertaining to advanced biotechnology, agro-ecology, smart-irrigation management, disease monitoring, control and safety, food industry, livestock, soil security, landscape management and institutional policy and governance. The paper seeks to present an integrated view of these stock takes and how they can help in addressing simultaneously climate change and food security, spatial prioritization, closing gaps, strong interfacing of society and ecology and achieving land degradation neutrality.

Oasis agriculture revitalization and carbon sequestration for climate-resilient communities

“…These approaches offer potential solutions to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on oasis agriculture, providing opportunities for enhanced resilience and sustainable development in these vulnerable regions. Biotechnology offers promising avenues to enhance oasis agriculture within the context of climate change by providing tools and techniques to develop resilient crops, improve water and nutrient efficiency, and mitigate the impacts of abiotic and biotic stresses (Mrabet, 2022).…”

Digging deeper into the impacts of different soil water systems on the date palm root architecture and associated fungal communities

“…fruits, cereals, vegetables), which thus bene t from the excessive watering (carried out to meet the date palm water needs) (Battesti 2005). There is currently increased interest in agroecology in arid and oasian environments as a response to climate change to increase and diversify farm production overall (Ameur et al 2020;Mrabet 2022). A choice thus has to be made between: (i) date palm monoculture agricultural models with adapted irrigation systems to save as much water as possible, and (ii) agroecosystems with less water use e ciency for date production but enabling crop and production diversi cation.…”