Can the oil industry help address climate change? Saudi Arabia says yes.
May, 2023
Thadiq and Al Ghat, Saudi Arabia- A bulldozer and a crane lift barren earth from the ground at breakneck speed as six men in white thobe gowns tied around their waists carefully stack 100-pound slabs of rock in a long, neat row.
A bustling construction project is not uncommon in Saudi Arabia, a country in the grip of rapid economic and social change.
But here in Thadiq, in the baking Najd desert north of Riyadh, the only structure in sight is a 4-foot stone wall. The men work in a flat, exposed, dusty expanse pockmarked with hundreds of neatly dug holes, 4 feet long and 1 foot wide, stretching to the horizon like a battlefield cemetery waiting for the fallen.
This grand project is not the start of another gleaming skyscraper. It is something even more audacious: a future forest.
“Greening needs effort and patience,” Abdullah al-Issa, or Abu Brahim, says as he directs the preparations for planting 30,000 saplings. “When you are doing good work, there is a lot of work to do.”
A Saudi Johnny Appleseed, this middle-aged agricultural engineer with twinkling eyes and a constant smile started planting different saplings and seeds he had accumulated from across the kingdom in these then-barren fields a decade ago in a bid to reverse the desertification encroaching on his hometown.
After his initial success, the Saudi government declared the 220-square-mile area the Thadiq National Park in 2018. Now, with government encouragement and funds, he has planted 170,000 trees and is preparing for the next 100,000.
On this warm February morning, Abu Brahim has a visitor: Abdullah al-Subeihi, a conservationist and arborist from the country’s National Center for Vegetation Cover (NCVC), the government agency tasked with scaling up greening projects like this one.
“When it comes to forestation, action, not words, matter,” Mr. Subeihi says, admiring the budding red fruits of a 4-foot-tall jujube. “These stunning results are a great sign.”
With four decades’ experience in conservation, Mr. Subeihi is a human library of the trees, shrubs, and flowers native to Saudi Arabia. Squeezing branches, pinching fruits, and gently caressing healthy green leaves, Abu Brahim and Mr. Subeihi geek out over each tree and shrub like gearheads admiring a classic car.
Finally, they arrive at the secret to Abu Brahim’s success: a large rainwater catchment dam, one of 100 in the park. Completed in the summer of 2022, it consists of a series of low-lying stone walls that decrease in height like giant steps down into the valley floor. The design is intended to redirect and slow increasingly frequent winter floods to keep them from tearing up shrubs and saplings and to allow groundwater and aquifers to regenerate.
Two-week-old rainwater collects in a clear lake with young acacia trees sprouting from the center. Pigeons and shrikes hop at the water’s edge, and butterflies float from shrub to shrub. Multiple desert fox and hare sightings have been reported in the park, and Riyadh picnickers have started to gather here on weekends.
“When I started, there were only five trees in this whole area. In my children’s time, this will be a forest that they can take their children to,” Abu Brahim says, leaning his arm on a dam wall. “This is an amazing feeling,” he says, gazing at the acacia trees on the horizon. “This is the feeling of life.”
Planting billions of trees, going solar, capturing carbon from the sky, and a green hydrogen revolution – Saudi Arabia’s declared green transition sounds as fanciful as it is surprising from a fossil-fuel giant.
But few countries in the world have the deep-pocket resources and centralized decision-making like Saudi Arabia to make it happen.