The UAE go green - miracle or mirage?
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) don’t do anything halfheartedly. Superlatives and hyperbole have become a second language to those involved in the many record-breaking projects that are underway in the country.
Now the UAE has embraced sustainability and is pumping billions into research and initiatives to advance green technologies.
Abu Dhabi is the epicentre of the UAE’s gigantic green drive, which came as a suprise to many. After all, the UAE are among the world’s leading oil and gas exporters.
But in the last decade the country’s long-term economic strategy has focused on diversification and the cultivation of non-oil dependent industries such as tourism, media, finance and now, sustainable technologies.
Much of this is due to the legacy of the late President His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who ruled the UAE for more than 30 years and set forth an agenda of religious tolerance, economic reform and protection of the environment.
Masdar City, a living sustainability laboratory currently under construction, is now the centre piece of Abu Dhabi’s environmental strategy. The city will house up to 40,000 residents and employ 50,000 more, but produce no carbon emissions and no waste whatsoever. It will cost US$ 22 billion and is scheduled for completion in 2016. Masdar is the biggest single investment in sustainability to date.
According to Sam Nader of the Masdar Initiative, the project’s aims are „integrating various applications of existing renewable technologies, the cultivation of an innovative academic and business community and the generation of significant intellectual property in order to position Abu Dhabi as a world leader in renewables energy and sustainability.“
Unsurprisingly, the world media have lapped up the story and have bathed the UAE in green limelight.
But some experts have pointed out that initiatives such as Masdar have not yet changed much.
“The numbers must be put into perspective. They are spending welcome billions of dollars on renewables but trillions are still going into climate-changing oil economies. The future is the sun and renewables but there is no time to wait for this revolution,” Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian.
The 420,000 residents of Abu Dhabi remain among the world’s greatest emittors of greenhouse gases, according to the World Resources Institute.
Tags: Abu Dhabi, environment, Masdar, sustainability, The Guardian, UAE, World Resources Institute
