In March 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the Saudi Green Initiative and the Middle East Green Initiative — two bold plans to combat climate change and protect the environment. These projects demonstrate the Kingdom’s commitment towards a greener, more sustainable Saudi Arabia.
“This green drive has improved the urban landscape of cities, and bettered quality of life through better air quality and public parks providing a temperate place for a pre-iftar walks during Ramadan, or a place to relax in the summer” — states Abdullah Al-Dakhil for Arab News.
The government, as Abdulrahman Abdulmohsen A. AlFadley is the Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture (MEWA), states that “the Ministry always seeks to update its programs and plans that aim at developing its services in the fields of the environment, water and agriculture to be in line with the Saudi Vision for 2030”.
One example of this is the “Let’s Make It Green” campaign to plant 10 million trees before the end of April 2021. The campaign targets 165 sites across all regions of the Kingdom. Saudi officials focused on planting endangered trees and shrubs in areas which were environmentally degraded due to overgrazing, logging, uprooting and urban sprawl.
This green campaign is among several other initiatives recently launched by MEWA under the Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan to increase vegetation and combat desertification in the Kingdom.
Saudi officials call the “Green Saudi” and the “Green Middle East” initiatives “the largest of their kind in the world”.
The projects are aimed to protect the planet through containing climate change and promoting nature.
The Crown Prince said that the Kingdom and the region face many environmental challenges, such as desertification and air pollution from greenhouse gases. The initiatives will raise vegetation cover, reduce carbon emissions, combat pollution, land degradation, and preserve marine life.
The “Green Saudi” and the “Green Middle East” initiatives will include planting 50 billion trees, of which the Kingdom’s share would be 10 billion trees over the coming decades. This represents four percent of the Kingdom’s contribution to achieving the goals of the global initiative to limit the land degradation and fungal habitats, and one percent of the global target to plant a trillion trees.
Saudi Arabia intends to start work on the “Green Middle East Initiative” together with the Gulf, Arab and the Middle Eastern countries by planting 40 billion trees. The two initiatives have gained global support from numerous countries as well as from international organizations.
The “Green Saudi Arabia” Forum will be held in the middle of 2021, while the “Green Middle East” Summit will take place by the end of 2021.
Increasing local production
MEWA has also placed particular importance on agricultural sustainability, with the recent announcement of investment opportunities worth SAR120 million in the production and multiplication of seed potatoes. This investment aims to encourage increasing local production and reducing imports to achieve self-sufficiency and to create job opportunities.
This Seed Centre will undertake the necessary supervision and follow-up processes to approve the seeds and to provide benefits.
Domestically, Saudi Arabia has suffered from desertification and debilitating dust storms mixed with low rainfall. Draping their cities in greenery and using artificial weather creation to increase rainfall will be paired with efforts to revive iconic Arabian wildlife, and to raise existing protected desert and marine ecosystems to 30% of the country’s sovereign territory.
