Today is Wednesday, 5 June 2024.
“We cannot turn back time, but we can grow forests, revive water sources, and bring back soils. We are the generation that can make peace with land.”
Established by the United Nations in 1973 and coordinated by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), World Environment Day is the braodest international movement focused on the environment.
Hosted this year by The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the theme for 2024 is “Our Land, Our Future. We are #GenerationRestoration", to emphasize the importance of restoring land, combating desertification, and enhancing resilience to drought.
Saudi Arabia, a 37 million inhabitants country in the desert and extremely rich due to its oil exports, is - and will be more and more - impacted by the Earth’s current trends: extreme weather events, water availability, food security, environment restoration and energy transition, just to name a few.
Saudi Arabia is behind the so-called “The Saudi Green Initiative”, like we reported directly from COP-28 in Dubai.
The initiative is, among others, a commitment to rehabilitate 40 million hectares of land and restore Saudi Arabia’s natural greenery, by planting 10 billion trees (!).
Saudi Arabia is also behind the largest green hydrogen plant in the world, related to an even bigger project, NEOM.
About an example of action focusing on drought resilience, did you read our yesterday’s post “United States and Russia. Satellite technology to forecast flash droughts, in times of new agriculture scenarios.”? Such an interesting technology and impact of climate change to grains production.
Click at the image below for the official World Environment Day campaign website, with references to resources, events and activities. In several languages.
Last year, the World Environment Day focused on solutions to plastic pollution.
