North Africa is one of the most water-scarce regions on Earth, and demand is intensifying from nearly every direction at once. A fast-growing population, heavy agricultural needs, rising temperatures, and expanding cities and industries are all drawing from a supply that was already limited. By mid-century, total water demand across the Middle East and North Africa is projected to rise by 50%, while climate change simultaneously cuts available supply by roughly 12%.
Agriculture Consumes Most of the Supply
Farming is the single largest drain on North Africa’s water. Globally, over 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and in arid regions like North Africa, that share is even higher. Countries across the Maghreb and the Nile Valley rely on irrigation to grow food in landscapes that receive very little rainfall, meaning nearly every crop depends on extracted water rather than what falls from the sky.
The problem is compounded by how that water gets used. In Morocco, roughly 83% of irrigated farmland still relies on traditional flood or furrow methods, where water flows across fields in open channels. These systems deliver water to the crop at an efficiency of only about 40%, meaning more than half the water applied never reaches plant roots. It evaporates, seeps into the ground, or runs off. Only about 17% of Morocco’s irrigated land uses modern sprinkler or drip systems. Across the region, this inefficiency means countries must withdraw far more water than their crops actually need, amplifying pressure on rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers that are already stretched thin.
Rapid Population Growth and Urbanization
The region’s population is growing fast. The broader Middle East and North Africa region, home to roughly 300 million people at the turn of the century, is projected to more than double to nearly 700 million by 2050. Egypt alone will see its domestic water demand climb from about 56 billion cubic meters per year to over 85 billion. Algeria’s municipal demand is expected to nearly double, from 6.4 billion to almost 12 billion cubic meters. Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya all face similar trajectories.
About 60% of the population already lives in urban areas, and that share keeps rising as people migrate to cities for economic opportunity. Urban residents use water differently than rural populations. Cities need water for household plumbing, sanitation systems, commercial buildings, and the infrastructure that supports dense populations. Every new apartment block, school, and hospital adds to the draw. The projected growth in urban water demand across the region is staggering: municipal consumption is expected to roughly triple from 28 to 88 billion cubic meters per year by mid-century.
Climate Change Is Shrinking the Supply
While demand rises, the supply side is moving in the opposite direction. North Africa is already one of the hottest, driest inhabited regions on the planet, and climate change is making it worse. Rising temperatures increase evapotranspiration, the process by which water evaporates from soil and transpires from plants. Under a moderate warming scenario, evapotranspiration rates across the region are projected to climb by up to 0.37 millimeters per year through mid-century and up to 0.51 millimeters per year by 2100. Under a high-emissions scenario, those rates accelerate further.
The practical result is less water staying in reservoirs, rivers, and soils. Annual water availability across the region could decline by 26 millimeters by 2100 under moderate warming, or by 62 millimeters under high emissions. That may sound small in absolute terms, but spread across millions of square kilometers and compounded over decades, it represents an enormous loss. Reservoirs evaporate faster. Soils dry out more quickly between rains. Rivers carry less water downstream. The total water shortage across the Middle East and North Africa is projected to reach 199 billion cubic meters per year by 2050, an increase of 157 billion cubic meters over current levels.
Ancient Groundwater Is Running Out
Beneath North Africa lies the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, one of the largest underground freshwater reserves on the planet, holding an estimated 500 trillion cubic meters of water. It stretches beneath Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Chad. For decades, countries have pumped from it to supplement scarce surface water, extracting over 2 billion cubic meters per year as of 2006.
The catch is that this water is essentially fossil water. Most of it is between 4,000 and one million years old, deposited during wetter climatic periods that ended thousands of years ago. It receives almost no meaningful recharge from modern rainfall. Once pumped, it’s gone for any practical human timeline. Hydrogeologists estimate that only a small fraction of the total volume can be safely exploited without collapsing the aquifer system or degrading water quality. Countries across the region are drawing down a resource that took millennia to accumulate, and the pace of extraction is accelerating as surface water becomes less reliable.
Industry, Energy, and Tourism Add Pressure
Agriculture and households aren’t the only competitors. Industrial water demand across Africa is expected to increase by up to 700%, driven by manufacturing growth, energy production, and resource extraction. North African countries are actively expanding their industrial bases, and every factory, power plant, and mining operation requires significant water inputs for cooling, processing, and cleaning.
Tourism adds a less obvious but meaningful burden, particularly along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. In some developing regions, tourists at five-star hotels consume more than 3,000 liters of water per room per day, compared to roughly 93 liters for a local resident. North Africa’s tourism sector, concentrated in countries like Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, creates seasonal spikes in water demand in precisely the coastal areas where freshwater is already scarce. Swimming pools, golf courses, landscaped resorts, and daily laundry services all pull from the same supply that local communities depend on.
Shared Aquifers Create Tension
North Africa is fortunate in one respect: unlike the Nile basin to the east, the Maghreb countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) have few transboundary rivers or lakes that force direct competition between nations. But underground, the picture is different. Large aquifers frequently cross national borders, and there is no equivalent of a river treaty governing who can pump how much. As surface water dwindles and each country drills deeper, competition over these shared underground reserves is intensifying. Without adequate agreements, what starts as a resource management problem can become a source of friction between communities and between nations.
Desalination Offers Partial Relief
Governments across the region are investing heavily in desalination to close the gap. The Middle East and North Africa already account for 46% of global installed desalination capacity. Morocco announced plans to meet 60% of its drinking water needs through desalinated seawater by 2030, up from 25% currently. The scale of investment required is enormous: financing needs for desalination across the region between 2026 and 2029 are estimated at $6.3 to $7.2 billion per year in construction costs alone, plus another $5.4 to $6.7 billion annually to operate and maintain the plants.
Desalination can reliably produce freshwater from the sea, but it is energy-intensive and expensive, putting it out of reach for the poorest communities and for agricultural use at scale. It works well for coastal cities but does little for inland farming regions where the bulk of water demand sits. For North Africa, desalination is a critical piece of the puzzle, but not a solution by itself. The fundamental mismatch between a growing population in an arid climate and a shrinking natural water supply remains the defining challenge of the region’s future.