The Expo will be one of the first mega-events to take place since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and shall run from October 1, 2021 until March 2022.

It is expected to welcome more than 200 participants, including nations, multilateral organisations, academic institutions and businesses. Also for the first time in the 170-year history of World Expos, each participating country will have its own pavilion of a dedicated space, where it can showcase its culture and progress to the world.

At the same time, the Expo has been awarded the highest rating by CEEQUAL for eight of its infrastructure projects in terms of engineering, landscaping and public spaces. CEEQUAL is internationally recognised for its sustainability assessment on civil engineering with rating and certification for best practices in infrastructure projects.

Rating range from a pass at 30 percent to excellent at 75 percent accessed across a range of sustainability issues including land use, ecology, transport, resilience and pollution.

Expo 2020 is the first project in the Middle East to receive an ‘Excellent’ CEEQUAL’ rating for connecting all three of its Thematic Districts as a meeting place in a shaded microclimate which is unlike anywhere in Dubai – Al Wasl Plaza exceeded the award’s highest threshold, with a 91.6 per cent score.

While the trellis and steelwork of the 130-metre by 67.5-metre Al Wasl dome, which encircles the plaza creates the largest 360-degree projection surface in the world, scored a high of 93.6 per cent.

Recent cultural highlight of the Expo is the installation of a three-dimension replica of Michelangelo’s world-famous David sculpture at the centre of the Italy Pavilion. A painstaking work by artists which included 40 hours of digital scanning of the original 16^th-century marble artwork in Florence; the creation of a three-dimensional digital model with a

resolution of 146 thousandths of a millimetre; a production by one of the world’s largest three-dimensional  printers with finishing touches painstakingly done by hand.