HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa Chairs Board of Mohammed VI Foundation for Environment Protection

Rabat – Her Royal Highness Princess Lalla Hasnaa, chairperson of the Mohammed VI Foundation for Environment Protection, chaired, on Monday in Rabat, the Board of Directors of the Foundation over the results of the previous year.

Her Royal Highness is carrying abroad Morocco’s environment vocation. HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa presented the Youth Climate Initiative for Africa at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019, attended by many heads of state.

The African Youth Climate Hub, supported by the new Hassan II International Center for Environmental Education, will provide all the knowledge and initiatives that will be developed in there. It will turn this physical center into a virtual center which is accessible to all young people in Africa.

The Hassan II International Center for Environmental Education is today at the heart of the dissemination of education and awareness-raising actions of the Foundation. Inaugurated in the spring of 2019, it will produce the educational corpus and will offer training programs to support the Foundation’s actions, such as Eco-Schools, which is in its 18th year, Young Reporters for the Environment, whose 17th edition was marked by a new prize at the international competition, and other programs like Clean Beaches and Air/Climate.

For its 20th edition, Clean Beaches, which had launched a large communication campaign during the previous season, set up a major operation to fight plastic waste pollution in oceans: “bhar bla plastic”.

The program used social networks to highlight the efforts of partners in the field and the hashtag #b7arblatplastic quickly spread across the web during the summer, increasing the impact of the campaign.

Air/Climate developed in 2018 in territories, notably in Marrakesh, a pilot city for carrying out a carbon footprint and introducing electric mobility for motorcycles.

The Foundation’s programs have continued to grow. To support them, HRH Princess Lalla Hasnaa made two field visits. The first to the Al Masjid Eco-Schools in Ain Aouda, near Rabat, an establishment that has developed the Eco-Schools program and has been carrying the Green Pavilion since 2012.

A total of 2,172 schools are enrolled in the program, of which 44% are rural and 56% are urban, while 544 have gained the label Green Pavilion. The international connections of the program are developing in Japan and soon in China.

During the second visit to Marrakesh, Her Royal Highness surveyed the Palm Grove Safeguarding Program and was interested in its latest developments: an agroecology program for the benefit of the Palm Grove farmers’ families and the deployment of an important irrigation mechanism using the city’s wastewater.

The Foundation manages nearly twenty programs in Environmental Education, Coastline, Air and Climate, Sustainable Tourism, Marrakesh Palm Grove and Historic Gardens.