A new framework for the sustainable development goals of Saudi Arabia

1 Introduction

Saudi Arabia is among the top twenty in the world economically, and it comprises of fourteen regions with a population of over thirty-four million people (GAStat, 2019). The regions include Al-Riyadh; Makkah Al-Mokarramah; Al-Madinah AlMonawarah; Al-Qaseem; Eastern region; Aseer region; Tabouk region; Ha’il region; Northern Borders; Jazan region; Najran region; Al-Baha region; and Al-Jouf region. Historically, its economy’s progress heavenly relies on oil’s high revenues. The revenues decreased during low oil prices globally due to any economic meltdown, outbreak, or pandemic diseases such as COVID-19, among others. This problem can be augmented through energy diversification by investment in renewable energy sources (RES) and nuclear. The country has the largest crude oil production capacity- about 12 million barrels per day, and holding the world’s 16 per cent proved oil reserves ranking second after Venezuela (EIA, 2017).

The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is 769,681 million Saudi Arabian Riyal (SAR). The GDP per capita is 22,292 SAR, with gross savings to GDP of 3.1 per cent during the last quarter of 2019 (SAMA, 2020). The KSA economy depends highly on energy consumption, leading to high carbon emissions. Ensuring a greener environment requires technological innovation to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as ${\mathit{CO}}_2,{\mathit{CH}}_4,\mathit{and}{N}_{2}O$ . Saudi Arabia has many programs under the auspices of vision 2030 in realizing the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations (UN). Therefore, it will be interesting for the decision-makers to know how much the SDGs target achievable at the end of the year 2030. Hence, this motivated the research work.

The remaining paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature and established the research gap. Section 3 review the socio-economic study of KSA. In Section 4, the sustainable development goals are presented. In Section 5, the SDGs model formulation are discussed, while Section 6 presents and discusses the solution methodologies. 7 analyzes and discusses the results. Section 8 concludes the study.

2 Literature review and research gap

Over the years, research has been ongoing in the field of economic sustainability and development of the KSA. The effect of agricultural share and energy consumptions on the emissions of ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ per capita for KSA had been analyzed (Mahmood et al., 2019). The efficiency of energy consumption and their economic, cultural, technical, and institutional barriers for KSA had been studied (Alyousef and Abu-Ebid, 2012). The study analyzed scenarios and recommended policies and regulations for optimal energy mix and efficient supply to meet customer demand. A structural time series analysis was conducted for forty-two years from 1971 to 2013 in assessing the environmental quality of KSA relating to the total consumption of oil and carbon emission in the transportation sector of the economy (Alkhathlan and Javid, 2015).

Current energy conservation programs were highlighted, and significant policies and strategies to the achievement were proposed (Al-Ajlan et al., 2006). The effects of its growth are estimated; decomposition methods were then used to analyze the exogenous factors in mitigating such growth (Alarenan et al., 2020). In KSA, the power sector was examined in the direction of future attaintment for load balance target and control of consumptions (Al and Csala, 2019). They established the relationship amongst the consumption, peak load, and generation capacity in the long-run electricity demand growth.

The multivariate approach was used in investigating the causal relationships amongst energy consumption, price, carbon emissions, and economic growth in KSA (Alshehry and Belloumi, 2015). The GDP growth under vision 2030 of the KSA was estimated by multiple regression and principal component analysis using knowledge-based rather than the oil-based economy (Amirat and Zaidi, 2019). The sustainability and RES for the KSA have been intensively reviewed according to its vision in 2030 and documented (Amran et al., 2020). The research found that solar energy has potentials technological advancement in generating electricity to satisfy the KSA teaming population’s future demand. Similar research regarding economic growth, carbon emissions, and energy efficiency in KSA are found in (Howarth et al., 2017; Rahman et al., 2017).

Many authors study mathematical modelling approaches for the SDGs agendas 2030 regarding different countries in the literature. Sarkar and Sarkar (2020) and Habib et al. (2020) discussed about sustainable production systems and biodiesel, respectively. Some of them used goal programming (GP) with satisfaction (Ali et al., 2021; Nechi et al., 2019). Others integrated fuzzy goal programming (FGP), weighted GP (Nomani et al., 2017; Jayaraman et al., 2017), while others employed fuzzy logic, simulation models, multi-criteria approaches, interactive structural modelling (Jayaraman et al., 2015).

3 An Overview on Employment, Energy, GHGs and GDP

This section briefly describes some economic sectors of KSA like employment, energy efficiency, GDP, GHGs emissions, and electricity consumption.

3.1

3.1 Employment

The total economic dependency ratio of KSA is 125 per 100 people. Table 1 indicates that 64.82% male citizens of the age group fifteen and above engaged in the labour market. Simultaneously, their female counterpart has only 35.18% engaged in services, given the total number of employment to 3,170,272 during the last quarter of 2019. The percentage of males’ participation rate in the labour force is 66.6 while the female is 26, with an employment rate of 95.1 and 69.2 percent for both males and females. Alternatively, 945,387 of the same age group seek jobs in the kingdom, given rise to an unemployment rate of 2.2 percent for males and 21.3 percent for females. Riyadh has the highest employment rate, followed by Makkah and Eastern province with 40, 20, and 18 percent. In contrast, Al-Jouf has the highest unemployment rate, followed by Al-Baha and Jazan with 14.8 12.5 and 10.5 percent, respectively. The regional total employment distribution of KSA by gender and unemployment rate are presented in Table 1 and pictorially in Fig. 1a. The country’s total employment is 94.3 percent, and the unemployment rate is 5.7 percent during the fourth quarter of 2019. The employed persons work on average for 42.9 h, with monthly total average wages of 10,256 SAR (GAStat, 2019).

Table 1 Regional total employment by gender and unemployment rate.

S. No.	Regions	Males (%)	Females (%)	Total (%)	Unemployment rate (%)
1.	Al-Riyadh	25.87	14.35	40.22	4.9
2	Makkah Al-Mokarramah	12.24	7.28	19.52	5.1
3	Al-Madinah Al-Monawarah	2.20	1.43	3.63	9.4
4	Al-Qaseem	2.11	1.34	3.45	2.2
5	Eastern region	13.20	4.73	17.93	3.9
6	Aseer region	2.79	1.89	4.68	8.4
7	Tabouk region	1.04	0.70	1.70	4.4
8	Ha’il region	0.90	0.65	1.55	5.0
9	Northern Borders	0.75	0.41	1.17	4.1
10	Jazan region	1.34	1.04	2.38	10.5
11	Najran region	0.95	0.51	1.47	6.3
12	Al-Baha region	0.61	0.41	1.02	12.5
13	Al-Jouf region	0.77	0.42	1.19	14.8
14	Undefined	0.04	0.02	0.06

Source: General Authority for Statistics https://www.stats.gov.sa/en/823. [Accessed on 16/06/2020].

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Fig. 1

Employment distribution, energy consumption and GDP by sectors.

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3.4

3.4 Greenhouse gas emissions

The value of ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ per person emission in KSA was approximated to be 18.56 tons, which led her to become the 15th top emitter during 2009 (Amran et al., 2020). KSA’s current emissions are 517,079,407 tonnes of ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ equivalent and estimated to be 1.12 to 1.19 Gt ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ e by the year 2030 (Transparency, 2018). The country’s per capita ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ emissions in metric tons from 1960 to 2017 are depicted in Fig. 2. The country needs to emphasize the RES, such as wind, solar, geothermal energy, biomass, water, and ICT. The RES can be renewed continuously and naturally to minimize the high ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ emission level and invariably decrease electricity generation costs. They can replace coal, oil, and natural gas, which causes environmental safety. Carbon emission issues are addressed in several studies (Jemai et al., 2020; Yadav et al., 2021).

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Fig. 2

${\mathit{CO}}_2$ emissions (metric tons per capita) from 1960–2017.

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4 Sustainable development goals

The United Nation’s (UN) general assembly in September 2015, came up with an agenda for 2030 known as SDGs. The agenda comprises 17 goals, 169 targets, and 244 indicators. According to Modibbo et al., 2021, the goals are $:$ ”end poverty in all its forms everywhere; end hunger, achieve food security and adequate nutrition for all and promote sustainable agriculture; attain healthy life for all at all ages; provide equitable and inclusive quality education and life-long learning opportunities for all; achieving gender equality, empower women and girls everywhere; secure water and sanitation for all for a sustainable world; ensure access to affordable, sustainable and reliable modern energy services for all; promote robust, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and decent work for all; promote sustainable industrialization; reduce inequality within and among countries; build inclusive, safe and sustainable cities and human settlements; promote sustainable consumption and production patterns; promote actions at all levels to address climate change; attain conservation and sustainable use of marine resources, oceans and seas; protect and restore terrestrial ecosystems and halt all biodiversity loss; achieve peaceful and inclusive societies, rule of law, competent and capable institutions; and strengthen and enhance the means of implementation and global partnership for sustainable development.”

5 SDGs model formulation

This section formulates the multi-objective problem relating to KSA’s SDGs as a general model and optimizes them accordingly.

6 Methodology

This section discussed the methodologies used in this study.

7 Result analysis and discussion

This section analyzes the model and discusses the result obtained and its implication to attaintment of KSA vision 2030 in light of SDGs.

The information in Table 4 and 3 use for the numerical results of Eq. (5) of Section 5 for the KSA. However, due to lack of data on the sectoral contribution for GHGs emissions, goal $F_4$ is not considered in the numerical solution. Thus, using LINGO optimization package version 16 (Guide, 2016), the individual optimal solution of formulated model obtained as ${\mathbf{F}}_{\mathbf{1}}=\mathbf{352168028},{\mathbf{F}}_{\mathbf{2}}=\mathbf{295084839}$ , and ${\mathbf{F}}_{\mathbf{3}}=\mathbf{4158457}$ , respectively. The procedure for the solving the multi-objective optimization problem is that, consider one objective under the same set of constraints and ignore others; solve and record the value of the objective function considered and that of variables in an n $\times$ n matrix. Use the record and interchange the objective functions and solve again using the same set of solutions obtained in the first instance until all objective values are exhausted and values obtained. Repeat the process using the second goal until all exhausted. Then use the concept of fuzzy programming discussed in Section 6.1, and obtain the individual compromise solution. The results indicate that goals related to economic growth could be achieved by 47%, this could be attributed to the oil prices crisis in the world market due to the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted to the shutdown of business around the globe for nearly one year. Evident from Table 7, the goal of clean energy consumption is achievable by 67% in 2030. The goal related to employment is achievable by 78% based on the analysis; this is quite promising in attaining the vision 2030.

8 Conclusions

Achieving the sustainable development goals meant excelling and boosting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s economic growth. Economic growth was a desirable element for any nation’s economy and is responsible for increasing energy consumption, contributing to ${\mathit{CO}}_2$ emission that affects the environment we live in. Adequate availability of electricity for satisfying high demands for both domestic and industrial usage is necessary. It is optimizing the standard of living by engaging more citizenry into jobs to guarantee future population expansion and ensuring environmental safety.

The study modelled the SDGs of Saudi Arabia mathematically and quantified its achievement by 2030 to the best of our knowledge. The analysis showed that only 47% GDP related goals, 67% in energy consumption related goals, and 78%, and job-related goals will be achieved by the year 2030. Despite the increment in electricity tariff by the kingdom in an attempt to benchmark the domestic energy price with international standards, the country needed to diversify its energy mix and invest more in renewable energy sources to meet the industrial and domestic energy demands. More talented and productive youths should be engaging in boosting all the economic contributing sectors’ output to raise and stimulate government revenues and productivity.

Funding

This study received no funding from any agency or organization.