RIYADH: An integrated policy should be adopted for a sustainable Saudi Arabia, said Prince Faisal bin Turki Al-Faisal, president of the Saudi Strategic Studies Institute (SSSI), at the inauguration of a workshop in Riyadh on Sunday.
The event was also attended by Prince Turki Al-Faisal, chairman of the King Faisal Center For Research and Islamic Studies and president of the Steering Committee for the Saudi Initiative for Sustainability; Abdullah Al-Shehri, governor of the Electricity and Co-Generation Regulatory Authority (ECRA); and Sir Tom Phillips, British ambassador to the Kingdom.
"Increase in population in the Kingdom has created new challenges in various sectors such as energy, food, water and agriculture, " said Prince Faisal, adding that uniform action should be taken to cater to the rising needs in these sectors. He indicated that arable land in the Kingdom is taken for various construction works and that these projects should be carried out in environment friendly surroundings. He also urged participants of the workshop to find ways and means of resolving challenges whereby the Kingdom could develop its economy and find more employment opportunities.
The Kingdom has recently seen several specialized forums in the areas of economics, environment, energy, renewable energy and water. "These forums mostly concluded that sustainable development should now be at the heart of policy making in each sector to achieve a balanced and sustainable development in the Kingdom," he added.
To address these issues through a sustainability initiative, the prince said, the SSSI, supported by technical experts through the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Strategic Program Fund, is holding the workshop to develop an integrated policy for Saudi Arabia.
The workshop aims to introduce policies and strategies, which are globally accepted, to implement sustainable development. This includes discussions on economy, energy, environment, water, agriculture and sustainable urbanism.
ECRA Gov. Al-Shehri said the demand growth rate for electricity is high. "The estimated required investments for 2010 to 2020 is about SR340 billion. Saudi Electricity Company will provide 50 percent of the required funds while the balance has to be financed by the government," he said.
"Creating a more sustainable, more efficient, more economically diverse Saudi Arabia seems to me to be the key long term economic challenge facing Saudi Arabia. But we are all partners in the wider effort to address the problem of climate change, and the UK looks forward to continuing to work with Saudi Arabia to find creative and effective ways forward," said Phillips. He pointed out that there is a clear scientific consensus that extreme weather events such as the heavy and early snow currently affecting the United Kingdom will happen more frequently if we do nothing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. "We shall also see more droughts, desertification and floods of the kind which struck Jeddah in 2009."
"This is a problem we need to address collectively. In the UK we account for 2 percent of the world's emissions, so we know that taking action alone will not be enough. We need to work together if we are to avert some of the worst impacts of climate change," he added.
The envoy added that some in Saudi Arabia worry that action to get a grip on climate change might be a greater threat to states in which fossil fuels are found than climate change itself. And it's also true that some environmentalists seek to demonize fossil fuels, including oil, neglecting the truth that we shall be dependent on fossil fuels for the majority of our energy use for most of the next century.
"As a fellow oil producer (although on a much smaller scale), we know that oil has to be part of the solution. That's why we are working with the Saudi government and fellow oil producers such as Norway and Holland on the Four Kingdoms Dialogue on Carbon Capture and Storage," he concluded.
© Arab News 2010
