His Excellency, Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Engineer Abdulrahman Abdulmohsen Al-Fadhly
Your Excellency, Distinguished Guest, Friend,
It’s nice to be right here in Riyadh.
Five weeks from now, June fifth, marks World Environment Day, which is generously hosted by Saudi Arabia.
Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of individuals will take part on this milestone second in environmental activism.
Since 1973, World Environment Day, led by the United Nations Environment Programme, has helped provoke motion on a few of the planet’s most urgent environmental challenges.
This 12 months’s World Environment Day will focus the world’s consideration on three typically neglected however harmful challenges: land degradation, desertification and drought.
Today, one-fifth of the earth’s land is degraded. Our lakes are shrinking. Our forests are being misplaced. Our farms are turning into trash cans.
This degradation impacts the well-being of greater than 3 billion individuals, and the issue is predicted to worsen.
The United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which proudly helps World Environment Day, helps to fight this disaster.
The Decade, which started in 2021, is a world effort to forestall and reverse the harm people have triggered to the pure world.
After three years, every nation has pledged to revive 1 billion hectares of land, an space 4 occasions the scale of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
While these numbers are encouraging, they’re only the start.
At least 1.5 billion hectares must be restored by 2030 to guard the online of life on Earth and keep away from real-world impacts akin to meals shortages.
I hope this World Environment Day marks a turning level in our race to restoration.
Now is the time to maneuver from a dedication to motion to a promise to forestall, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation.
Ladies and gents, I wish to take this chance to salute the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the second nation in West Asia to host World Environment Day.
The nation has demonstrated worldwide management in combating drought, desertification and land degradation.
Saudi Arabia is a driving drive behind the G20 Global Land Initiative, an bold effort to cut back degraded land by 50 p.c by 2040.
The nation is main the $2.5 billion Middle East Green Initiative to fight local weather change by strengthening regional cooperation and financing inexperienced infrastructure.
And domestically, Saudi Arabia is pioneering efforts to make use of nature-based options to cut back emissions and restore and preserve land and sea.
We at UNEP welcome a robust partnership with Saudi Arabia, notably with the Saudi Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture to implement the National Environmental Strategy.
This complete framework is a crucial a part of the Saudi Transformation Program and the nation’s Vision 2030. World Environment Day comes forward of the sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, to be held right here in Riyadh in December.
This is predicted to be the biggest ever United Nations convention on land degradation and drought. Time is proscribed, so this is a crucial alternative to provoke international efforts to handle these vital points.
We are the primary era to completely perceive the immense threats to our planet, and we could be the final to have an opportunity to reverse the tide of destruction.
Our precedence now have to be to revive ecosystems: replant forests, rewet wetlands and regenerate soils.
Restoration creates a haven for wildlife and helps avert the extinction disaster that threatens our planet.
We can fight local weather change by restoring the power of forests and rivers to retailer the carbon that contributes to international warming.
You can create a buffer round your group and shield it from climate-related disasters that turn into extra widespread every year.
Restoration additionally advantages the economic system. Every greenback invested in restoring degraded land gives as much as $30 in financial return.
But profitable restoration requires everybody to work collectively.
Governments, companies, scientists, faith-based organizations, civil society, and people should all work collectively.
Friends, in 1992, the world met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and adopted three landmark conventions masking local weather change, biodiversity, and desertification.
These agreements ought to function a north star on the highway to restoration. But we can not cease in the present day’s local weather disaster, tomorrow’s biodiversity loss and tomorrow’s land degradation.
We must deal with all these points collectively and acknowledge that wholesome land is important to realizing the Sustainable Development Goals, that are due in lower than six years. How can we handle land extra sustainably to construct resilience and handle poverty? How can we actually acknowledge the worth of biodiversity in our financial programs? How can we embed sustainability on the coronary heart of decision-making? And how are nations delivering on their restoration guarantees?
The excellent news is that we have now the options and the means, and with the United Nations Decade for Recovery, we have now the platform to revive our land to its former glory.
We now want international resolve to ship on the promise of restoration.
This World Environment Day is a good alternative to encourage motion amongst tons of of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
We are the era that may make peace with the land.
So let’s undo the harm we have finished and provides our youngsters and our youngsters’s kids an opportunity at a greater future.