While hosting the COP22 climate talks, Morocco boasted about its green credentials. However, ‘An increasing part of the renewable energy programmes that Morocco is promoting – even on the official COP22 website – are not taking place in Morocco at all, but in Western Sahara, which it illegally and brutally occupies’, warns a new report from Western Sahara Resource Watch.
Last year, the Moroccan government illegally extracted over one million tonnes of phosphate from Western Sahara. Almost all the energy used to mine that phosphate was provided by 22 windmills recently built by the German company Siemens.
Morocco has huge plans for solar energy plants – built in occupied Western Sahara – to provide over 25 percent of Morocco’s electricity by 2020.
www.wsrw.org/a105x3614
Topics: Western Sahara