Your excellency, Engineer Abdulrahman Abdulmohsen Alfadley, Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture
Your excellencies, distinguished guests, friends,
It is wonderful to be here in Riyadh.
On 5th June, five weeks from now, we will mark World Environment Day, which is graciously being hosted by Saudi Arabia.
Hundreds of millions of people will engage in this milestone moment for environmental action.
Since 1973, World Environment Day led by the UN Environment Programme has helped to drive action on some of the planet’s most-pressing environmental problems.
This year, World Environment Day will direct the world’s gaze to three perilous, though often-overlooked, challenges: land degradation, desertification and drought.
One-fifth of earth’s land is now degraded. Our lakes are shrivelling up. Our forests are disappearing. Our farms are turning into dustbowls.
This degradation affects the well-being of more than 3 billion people – and the problem is only expected to get worse.
The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration – which is proudly supporting World Environment Day – is helping to counter this crisis.
Launched in 2021, the Decade is a global effort to prevent and reverse the damage humanity has done to the natural world.
Three years in, countries have pledged to revive 1 billion hectares of land, an area four times the size of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
That number is encouraging but it is just a start.
We need to restore at least 1.5 billion hectares by 2030 if we are going to safeguard the web of life on Earth and avoid real consequences for ourselves, like food shortages.
I hope this World Environment Day can be a turning point in our race to restoration.
Now is the time to move from committing to action to acting on commitments to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation
Friends, I take this opportunity to acknowledge the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is only the second country in West Asia to host World Environment Day.
This nation has shown leadership in addressing drought, desertification and land degradation internationally.
The Kingdom is the driving force behind the Group of 20 Global Land Initiative, an ambitious effort to reduce degraded land by 50 per cent by 2040.
The country is leading the Middle East Green Initiative, a USD 2.5 billion push to counter climate change by bolstering regional cooperation and financing green infrastructure.
And at home, the Kingdom is pioneering initiatives using nature-based solutions to reduce emissions, and restore and preserve its land and sea.
We at UNEP welcome our strong partnership with the Kingdom, and in particular our collaboration with the Kingdom’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture as it implements the country’s National Environment Strategy.
This comprehensive framework is a key part of the Saudi Transformation Program and the country’s Vision 2030.World Environment Day comes ahead of the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, which will be hosted here in Riyadh, in December.
This is expected to be the largest-ever UN conference on land degradation and drought. This is an important opportunity to galvanize global efforts to address these critical issues because time is running short.
We are the first generation to now fully understand the immense threats to the land – and might be the last one with a chance to reverse the course of destruction.
Our priority now must be on restoring ecosystems – on replanting our forests, on rewetting our marshes, on reviving our soils.
Restoration can create havens for wildlife, helping to foil the extinction crisis gripping our planet.
It can counter climate change by reviving the ability of forests and rivers to store planet-warming carbon.
It can create buffers around communities, protecting them from climate-related disasters, which are becoming more common by the year.
Restoration can also be a boon for economies: every dollar invested in reviving degraded lands brings up to 30 US dollars in economic returns.
But for restoration to be successful, we need everyone onboard.
Governments, businesses, scientists, faith-based organizations, civil society and individuals all must join forces.
Friends, in 1992, the world came together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to adopt three landmark conventions covering climate change, biodiversity and desertification.
These accords should serve as our North Star on the road to restoration. But we cannot stop the climate crisis today, biodiversity loss tomorrow, and land degradation the day after.
We need to tackle all these issues together – and acknowledge that healthy land is crucial for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals, which come due in six short years. How do we manage land more sustainability so that we build resilience and address poverty? How do we truly acknowledge the value of biodiversity in our economic systems? How do we build sustainability into the heart of decision-making? And how countries deliver on restoration commitments made?
The good news is, we have the solutions, the means and, with the UN Restoration Decade, the platform to restore our lands to their former glory.
We now need a global resolve to live up to our restoration commitments.
This World Environment Day is a golden opportunity to spur hundreds of millions of people to take action.
We are the generation that can make peace with land.
So let us undo the damage we have done, let us give our children and our children’s children a chance at a better future.
