Saudi Arabia is home to many of the world’s largest, driest, and hottest shifting-sand deserts, making them particularly susceptible to suffer from rising global temperatures, as are their Gulf neighbors. Thankfully, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has recently announced two massive initiatives to protect the Middle East from climate change – the Green Saudi and Green Middle East initiatives.
The initiatives aim to take the crown of the world’s largest tree-planting project — 50 billion trees across the Arab states, and efforts at home to double the size of the Kingdom’s protected areas. Once complete, the tree-planting project will be twice the size of the Great Green Wall in the Sahel region.
The initiative also plans to create an enormous green energy drive that would cut domestic emissions by 60% and global carbon emissions by 8%. This would involve producing 50% green energy by 2030.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Arab News:
As a leading global oil producer, we are fully aware of our responsibility in advancing the fight against the climate crisis, and that just as we played a leading role in stabilizing energy markets during the oil and gas era, we will work to lead the coming green era.
Locally, Saudi Arabia has experienced desertification and devastating dust storms mixed with low precipitation. To remedy this, the initiative plans to:
- Cover their cities with trees
- Use artificial weather creation to boost rainfall
- Revive iconic Arabian wildlife
- Increase existing protected desert and marine ecosystems to 30% of the country’s sovereign territory
The crown prince added:
This is just the beginning. The Kingdom, the region, and the world at large need to move forward at an accelerated pace in the fight against climate change.
Across the Middle East, Saudi Arabia plans to help nations install more efficient hydrocarbon technologies that will cut more than 130 million tons of carbon emissions. Further details on the exact methods and strategies of the program will be announced in the second quarter of 2022.
