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Desert greening

Saudi Green Initiative

Vision 2030’s tree-and-land programme. Officials now claim the first million hectares. That is not the old wheat circles, and it is not yet ten billion trees.

Center-pivot irrigation circles in Saudi Arabia: the older groundwater-agriculture landscape, shown here as context, not as SGI tree-planting
Image: O.V.E.R.V.I.E.W. (Flickr) ( CC BY 2.0 )
Desert greening Ongoing Saudi Arabia

Jurisdiction: Saudi Arabia
Years / status: Announced 2021 under Vision 2030. Target: 10 billion trees / about 40 million hectares rehabilitated. Official early-2026 claim: 1 million ha and 159 million trees. Status: ongoing. Separate history: 1980s-2010s fossil-groundwater wheat.

The plan

SGI is an afforestation, reserve and land-rehabilitation programme (plus a Middle East Green Initiative diplomacy track). It is not NEOM, not the Line, and not the old wheat-subsidy machine. The water story the state now tells is treated wastewater, dams and efficiency: because the Kingdom is one of the most water-scarce countries on Earth.

Construction / status

Planting and “rehabilitation” campaigns are underway via MEWA and the National Center for Vegetation Cover. Officials said rehabilitated area moved from 18,000 hectares at the start to 250,000 by 2024 and 1 million in early 2026, with 159 million trees planted. Those are government and SPA figures, not a third-party stem count. A 2030 waypoint of 2.5 million hectares has been mentioned.

What went wrong, or only partly worked

If the official million hectares holds under audit, it is 2.5 percent of the 40-million-hectare slogan: a start, not a completed greening of Arabia. Independent literature still stresses the older, better-measured story: decades of wheat grown on non-renewable aquifers, later scaled back (including a mid-2010s wheat phase-down) because the water did not return. Desalination mainly serves cities; it does not make cereal irrigation cheap. SGI’s own tree-water demand is a live research question.

Lessons

Keep the programmes apart: SGI ≠ pivot-circle wheat ≠ NEOM. Believe planted-and-surviving numbers when plots are public. A desert can host parks and still have a mined aquifer underneath. Ten billion trees is a target. One million hectares, if real, is a first increment.

Sources

Vision 2030 Saudi Green Initiative page; MEWA/SPA 2026 milestone claim; FAO AQUASTAT for the groundwater and wheat context. Pivot-circle photo is historical irrigation, labelled as such.