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APPENDIX C
Saudi Arabia
TUNISIA
SYRIA
LEBANON PALESTINIAN TERR.. JORDAN ORDAN ORD DAN N
MOROCCO ALGERIA
IRAQ KUWAIT
LIBYA
EGYPT
SAUDI
BAHRAIN QATAR
ARABIA
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
MAURITANIA
OMAN YEMEN
SUDAN DJIBOUTI
SOMALIA
S
audi Arabia occupies 185.6 million hectares of productive land and water. Of those, 977 thousand are forest, 3.7 million are cropland, 170 million are grazing land, and 1.4 million support the country’s built infrastructure. Saudi Arabia also has 9.6 million hectares of continental shelf and inland water to support fisheries. Taking into account differences between average regional yields for cropland, grazing land, forest, and fisheries as compared with corresponding global yields, Saudi Arabia’s total biocapacity is 17.1 million gha. This is much less than its total Ecological Footprint of 104 million gha.
Saudi Arabia’s average Ecological Footprint per person is 4.0 gha, 1.5-times the global average footprint of 2.7 gha. Compared to the rest of the world, the average footprint of an inhabitant in Saudi Arabia is somewhat larger, and is equivalent
COMOROS
to many upper middle-income countries. Reducing the country’s Ecological Footprint will involve multiple strategies: significant improvement in resource efficiency; change in consumption patterns; and expansion of biocapacity without resource intensive production. As indicated in Figure 34, Saudi Arabia’s Ecological Footprint per person is much greater than the 0.7 global hectares of biocapacity available per person. The overshoot is caused by a high rate of consumption and population growth. The country’s population grew from 4.2 million to 26.2 million between 1961 and 2008. Over the same time period, the biocapacity available per person decreased by 27 percent.