Environmental options assessment for Morocco

Environmental Protection Agency"s comparative risk assessment methodology. The study team organized environmental problems around the sectors of economic activity that produced them (industry, mobile sources, households, agriculture, and natural-resource based activities); assessed the impacts of each problem on health, the economy, and ecosystems; and developed criteria to evaluate the importance of each impact. For health, these were three: the severity of the health impacts, the number of people affected, and reversibility effects. For the economy, there were two criteria: total cost and the timing of that cost. Natural ecosystem effects were evaluated in terms of: the severity of ecosystem damage, whether the ecosystem is common or unique, the extent of human dependence on the ecosystem for non-marketed services, the number of people dependent on the ecosystem, and the timing of impacts. The team scored each problem according to each criterion on a scale of one (minimal impact) to five (serious impact), averaging the scores to develop a composite indicator of the importance of each problem area relative to the others. The team also identified possible project activities to respond to these problems, reviewing each activity according to eight criteria: the importance of the problems to which it responds (which is the composite score on the problem assessment), its potential impact on those problems, the priority of the problem to the Government of Morocco, the priority of the problem to USAID, U.S. comparative advantage, trade and investment opportunities, sustainability, relation to other donor activities, and support to NGOs and women"s groups. The major project options evaluated included: (1) protected zones for drinking water intake; (2) sanitary landfill management; (3) management support for sewage collection and treatment; (4) integrated watershed management; (5) eco-tourism development in Morocco"s interior; (6) artisanal tannery improvement; (7) air quality improvement and monitoring; (8) phosphate processing emissions elimination; (9) industrial pollution prevention; (10) water erosion of soils; (11) dune encroachment control; (12) Oum er Rbia River catchment basin management and environmental quality; and (13) Sebou integrated management plan. (Author abstract, modified)