Can the oil industry help address climate change? Saudi Arabia says yes.
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.”
Can a desert turn green – and stay green? Can the world’s second-largest oil producer lead the fight against climate change? Saudi Arabia is saying yes to both – a bold bet whose payoff depends on places like Thadiq and individuals like Abu Brahim.
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
