Deputy Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture Eng. Mansour Al-Mushaiti considered sustainability as a main pillar for national priorities, stressing the importance of providing innovative solutions to help utilize untapped potential of resources across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through a lifetime digital transformation journey via building a digital society, economy and nation. He added that this can be realized through exerting efforts to overcome hardships via enhancing and facilitating harmony in work, boosting a smart and effective ecological system for decision making, achieving cooperation among all sectors, refraining from traditional tools, applying the latest emerging technologies, and spreading AI applications in the best ways possible. Al-Mushaiti's remarks came during a panel discussion dubbed "Ecological outlook to adopt AI", which was held during the 2nd Global AI Summit at the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center in Riyadh. The deputy minister noted that the cost of food exceeds SR100 billion, while the water infrastructure budget for the five coming years is estimated at SR300 billion, and the same time, money and efforts are required to maintain and protect the environment and alleviate the impacts of climate change and reach carbon neutrality by 2030 and plant 10 billion trees over the coming decades. He also referred to the importance of AI in speeding up various stages of progress in a proactive manner to apply modern and emerging technologies that can contribute to realizing strategic goals in full harmony with the Saudi Vision 2030. He noted that the ministry has launched a free digital guiding platform named "the agricultural guide" to acquaint farmers with mechanisms of using modern technologies. Al-Mushaiti also announced a partnership between the ministry, SDAIA and Google to launch the first center in the world specialized to provide sustainability solutions and applications with the use of AI technologies under the name "Artificial Intelligence Center", which aims at adopting advanced technologies in all the sectors of the ministry and implementing three programs with 11 initiatives to all sectors in a gradual and ambitious way. He pointed out that the first phase will focus on developing forecasts that rely on climate and sustainability data to help observe and predict climate change in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and abroad. — SPA
