Staying and moving: how ideas and skills help a Moroccan town adapt to climate change

What is it about?

People who move away often bring back ideas, skills and values, which researchers call social remittances. This article asks how such ideas help a community respond to climate change, and it argues that people who stay in one place matter just as much as those who move. The study looks at Skoura M'Daz, a town in Morocco's Middle Atlas where droughts and other environmental changes are putting pressure on farming. Local people have started building up ecotourism as an additional source of income. Between 2021 and 2022, interviews, surveys and observation in the town and nearby cities showed how this came about. Ideas arrived through studying, working and training in other places, through visitors, and through social media. Whether they took root depended on people with lasting ties to the town, who knew how to get things done locally, and on pauses along the way that changed the ideas themselves.

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Photo by Patrick Ogilvie on Unsplash

Photo by Patrick Ogilvie on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Research on migration and climate adaptation tends to focus on people who move and on the money they send home. This article shows that the exchange of ideas and skills matters too, and that it often depends on people who stay, including those who never migrated. It also shows that social remittances are not a one-way flow from a place of origin to a place of destination. They pass through many places, combine with new ideas and grow from individual initiatives into shared community projects. For policy, this is relevant because Morocco promotes development in rural areas to discourage out-migration. The study suggests that supporting local networks, training and people who connect the town with the outside world could strengthen adaptation. Whether ecotourism will succeed in the long run remains open.

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