World Environment Day 2024

The 2024 day is focusing on land restoration, desertification and drought resilience. As a nation facing degradation, desertification and drought, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is deeply invested in delivering solutions. The Kingdom is acting nationally and regionally through the Saudi Green Initiative and the Middle East Green Initiative. And it is acting globally, as we saw when the Saudi presidency of the G20 resulted in the adoption of the Global Land Restoration Initiative.

Such action and leadership are vital as we face a worrying intensification of the triple planetary crisis: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss, and the crisis of pollution and waste. This crisis is placing the world’s ecosystems under assault. Billions of hectares of land are degraded, affecting almost half of the world’s population and threatening half of global GDP. Rural communities, smallholder farmers and the extremely poor are hit hardest.