Emissions

Subsidising Natural Resources in the Gulf

2011-10-20T14:00:00Z

If there has been one non-living subject that has been taboo in the Gulf monarchies then it is the domestic pricing of natural resources. For years international economists and monetary agencies have prescribed cuts to fuel and utility consumer subsidies as a way out of the Gulf Cooperation Council states’ growing energy demand. Until mid-October however, the “s-word” had only been uttered behind the closed doors of ministries and government agencies grown increasingly worried about domestic energy security and the cost of maintaining it.

A surprise public statement from Dubai’s ENOC (Emirates National Oil Company) last Saturday (16 Oct) broke the silence by implying high subsidies had driven it to the verge of bankruptcy. The exceptional announcement, accompanied by read-between-the-lines messages typical of states not known for their transparency, precipitated a wave of media articles and tweets. ENOC had already topped the headlines in June of this year for the very same issue, but the company didn't admit the problem at the time. Saturday’s announcement was clear: “ENOC looks forward to the support of the concerned authorities in addressing the concern.”

In the UAE, the federal government (in this case read Abu Dhabi) sets the gasoline prices. They are currently at US$0.47 per litre, the highest price in the GCC, but not high enough to satisfy Dubai’s ENOC, which lacks refinery capacity and imports gasoline from international suppliers for sale in all emirates but Abu Dhabi. Due to rising international fuel prices, ENOC says it expects a whopping loss of US$735 million for the current year alone. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi’s national oil giant ADNOC has been opening new stations in the emirates of Ras Al Khaimah and Ajman. Some sources have even suggested it would entirely take over the five smaller emirates from ENOC and its subsidiary EPPCO.

So, one could easily conclude that this is a classic takeover scheme, with a more powerful company taking over a weaker one to create a monopoly. It is also symptomatic of much more. Here are a few of the most important wider political issues the latest Dubai crisis reflects:

Power struggle or passing the bill: The UAE, due to its federal structure and constitutional guarantees for Abu Dhabi over the sovereignty of its natural resources, is an exceptional case in the GCC. In addition to its emirate-level social contract, which includes highly subsidised power, water, gasoline and a number of direct and indirect welfare benefits for nationals, Abu Dhabi also bankrolls most of the federal budget and provides the northern emirates with most of their cheap electricity and water. In Dubai, which is becoming increasingly oil-scarce, the economic crisis has not cooled down resource demand growth, leaving the local government struggling with both gasoline and power supply. Refinery capacity is lagging and cheap gas supplies from Qatar are not expected to increase any time soon. Dubai’s plans for power supply in the next decade do not seem too convincing either, relying mostly on natural gas, growing the share of renewables to 1%, and investing in “clean coal” (the economic feasibility and environmental safety of which are controversial).

Some prefer to see the ENOC case in light of a broader Abu Dhabi-Dubai power struggle, as I myself suggested in an earlier post. Others have pointed out that Dubai might actually be on the gaining side, as the expected shift of gasoline provision from ENOC and EPPCO to ADNOC will effectively place the subsidy bill on Abu Dhabi’s shoulders. Less responsibility obviously equals less leverage, so in the end both might end up losing.

Resource availability differentiation: There is no doubt that some Gulf monarchies, like Qatar and the emirate of Abu Dhabi, could in theory afford to uphold the domestic illusion of limitless resources for many years, even decades to come. But there are some, like Bahrain, Oman and the all the other UAE emirates, that really should have begun raising their gasoline and utility prices many years ago. At current production rates, Bahrain’s and Oman’s proven oil reserves will run dry in 7 and 17 years, respectively. In order to meet its increasing electricity and water demand, Bahrain has signed deals to import natural gas from as far as Russia. Oman is importing gas from Qatar. The understanding that subsidy reform equals increased calls for public representation, however, continues to stick. Bahraini officials have recently declared "the era of cheap gas is over”, calls that have been accompanied by announcements of gas price rises for the industry only. Most residential users of electricity in Bahrain continue to pay only 0.8 US cents per KWh and in Oman they pay 2.6 US cents, while households in the US pay 11.6 cents and in Britain roughly double of this.

There is another key distinction to be made, namely between the different resources subsidised. Petrol subsidies are likely to stay around longer in all of the GCC states, with only moderate price rises in the horizon. Electricity and desalinated water, however, are different. They are mostly produced by burning natural gas. All GCC governments except Qatar will be forced to either continue bearing a higher price for believing that low prices will mean political stability, or devise a new power and water pricing regime that covers existing budget losses, incentivises the average consumer not to waste, and directs badly needed investments to this sector.

Effects of the Arab Spring: The ENOC announcement also needs to be understood in the broader context of the soft counterrevolutionary measures that GCC states have been employing since regimes began falling in the region. Merill Lynch recently estimated that domestic spending in the six states has increased by US$150 billion. Saudi Arabia is spending US$43 billion on its poor and Qatari nationals recently received a 60% pay rise. In March, Abu Dhabi announced US$1.55 billion to be invested in the expansion of the northern emirates’ power and water electricity sector alone. In August, Dubai, in a highly popular move among industries and businesses, announced a freeze in utility tariffs for the “next few years”. All these mixed signals can only mean one thing: leaders in the UAE are worried about the Arab Spring, but do not seem to agree on the role that natural resource prices play in it and how much should be sacrificed for the sake of boosting economic growth.

Unjust subsidies: It is a fact that GCC nationals are part of a social contract that includes high resource subsidies. At the same time, one cannot escape the moral problem that wealthy people tend to benefit more from flat rates, like prices and taxes, than do the poor. At the pump, it is hard to make a mechanism that distinguishes between those included and those excluded in the ruling bargain, or the rich and the poor. Electricity and water provision, however, is an easier area to target – and also the one where the gas crunch will be felt the most.

In the GCC states, nationals generally are wealthier than the large bulk of non-national residents and hence consume more. Slab tariffs have been introduced at least in Dubai, Bahrain and Oman, but their impact on curbing wasteful consumption is hard to measure. The new, higher tariffs in Dubai have reportedly driven some businesses to take measures, but the raises have so far exempted Emiratis.

Many innovative pricing mechanisms are currently being whispered by energy economists to government officials’ ears all over the GCC. These range from separate financial compensations for nationals to truly redistributive, pro-poor mechanisms. The Arab Spring has certainly made governments reluctant to make sudden moves, but at the same time these know that in the coming years prices will have to change. Except in Qatar.

In Qatar where gas is plenty, industries are large and the national population is a little over 200,000, the question is more of a moral kind than economic or availability-related: is it OK that a gardenless house uses 14,000 litres of (desalinated) water each day in a country that is classified as extremely water scarce and at a time of heigthened awareness on climate change? (The figure is from a Qatari-led study from 2003.) As I recently pointed out in a talk at Georgetown University in Doha, if we can afford to consume, does it always mean we should, especially when there are environmental impacts involved?

Towards alternatives: “Subsidy” is apparently a word disliked by many citizens of the Gulf region’s states for the negative connotations it carries. It is therefore a good start that at least a frank debate that uses this very word has now been opened. Other policy instruments, most importantly energy efficiency, however, also deserve increased attention. The good news is that when the inefficiency-inducing subsidies are gradually removed, efficiency will rise too.

Another area for GCC states to work more on is economic diversification away from oil dependency. A global oil demand peak will not be ENOC’s problem, but neighbouring Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have a reason for concern. As Kenneth Pollack wittily noted in a recent seminar at Brookings Center Doha, a new oil shock would be likely to drive Americans “to electric cars faster than you can say ‘Prius’." Given the magnitude of this task, however, and the changes that economic diversification will most likely imply for the existing social contracts, maybe a subsidy reform is not such a bad place to start with after all.

The Arab Awakening and the Environment

2011-09-27T20:15:00Z

As the Arab Awakening slowly but surely advances, social scientists and Middle East experts have been struggling to comprehend the changing rules of the game in this new, evolving situation, and where it is taking the region. Among them are environmentalists and students of environmental policymaking in the region. The big question for these people is: where is the Arab Spring taking the environmental agenda?

It's easy for scholars and experts studying environmental trends in the region to get frustrated, as the topic continues to be sidelined by "more urgent" issues relating to human and state security and socioeconomic development. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is a good point of reference: physiological necessities and the need for safety come before self-actualisation and focus on problems outside ourselves. So people in free Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt or Libya can't exactly be faulted for low environmental awareness. In these countries, the state still isn't able to guarantee basic safety and/or economic stability for its people, and the political reform processes remain tenuous. Welfare and stability should come first, followed by environmental issues. Right?

In the Gulf monarchies, revolutions have so far been effectively countered, but most citizens and middle class expatriates have much more than their basic needs covered. So they don't really have any excuse for complacency. Even if governments still don’t care enough, arguably people here should be demanding that their employers and social networks pay more attention to the environment. They're not. So what's wrong?

The case of Lebanon offers an answer, suggesting that material welfare alone doesn't necessarily lead to heightened levels of environmental awareness. Quite the contrary. War-torn and politically unstable, Lebanon has one of the most active environmental civil societies in the region: conservation, biodiversity, human health, climate change, waste, you name it. The short explanation for this is democracy. As Odeh al-Jayyousi, a regional director for the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), diplomatically noted in a July opinion piece, the six Gulf Cooperation Council states do not have an "adequate legal and institutional enabling environment for civil society engagement." The role of democracy is pretty straightforward, as environmental NGOs in places like the UAE, Syria and Lebanon will attest. In Lebanon, environmental NGOs have never been constrained by state sponsorship or fear. Still, despite a long history of broader liberties and rights than in most other Arab countries, the environmental movement in Lebanon remains far from the mainstream.

Environmental problems, and water-related issues in particular (scarcity, the water-agriculture nexus, and water-related conflicts and tensions) have long been at the heart of Middle Eastern instability. Domestically, persistent mismanagement, lack of public accountability, and bad governance of natural resources -- including water, ecosystems, land, air and energy -- is being made even worse by population growth and recent droughts. Business-as-usual policies and practices are bound to run into increasing trouble, as populations without water, clean air and a healthy environment become politically conscious.

In a June 2011 Middle East Institute briefing paper, Mohamed Raouf examines the presence of environmental themes during the Egyptian revolution. He believes that these "hibernating phenomena" were among the causes that lead to the uprisings. While protesters addressed some environmental problems, such as carcinogenic pesticides, water pollution, and pollution in general, the main issue was directly linked to the political sphere. A core problem, according to Raouf, was what people perceived government sales of natural gas to to neighbouring Israel -- for "unusually favourable terms" (namely, a third of 'the international price' under a long-term agreement signed in 2004) and despite rising domestic consumption -- to have been a waste of the country's natural resources.

The sociologically iconic street clean-up that ensued after the ousting of president Mubarak, however, was perhaps the most important sign of times to come: 'It’s our country so we are the ones who have to clean up, and it’s just the beginning', declared one participant. As Raouf too alludes in his article, a sense of participation also brings a sense of accountability. If people feel they have the power to make a change, a feeling of responsibility towards a desired outcome naturally follows. If our policies pollute, then we should strive towards better practices and push for better policies, both as individuals and interest-based groups.

Something to look for in this "new" Middle East and North Africa: the development of a notion of environmental stewardship, mentioned in both al-Jayyousi’s and Raouf’s articles. As the Gulf monarchies and Lebanon suggest, ongoing and future political reforms in the Arab world are much more likely to lead to rising environmental awareness than are high levels of material welfare and stability alone.

As al-Jayyousi writes, it is probable that a "genuine reform in governance and human rights will contribute to a new discourse" relating to environmental sustainability. Civil society organisations with environmental agendas will be key drivers in this change. Whether they will succeed in this massive task, and whether the framing of this new environmental agenda will happen through religious "greening" (see also Laura Wickström's piece on water and Islam), or a Westernised sustainable development discourse, is still not clear. For Middle Eastern NGOs, companies and governments alike, the road from annual beach clean-ups to genuine environmental agendas will be a long one. But at least the dynamism of change, brought by the Arab Spring, is here.

The City Dark

2011-09-05T08:00:00Z

Light is generally perceived as a force of good. It symbolises progress, development, modernity and wealth. It provides people in urban areas with a sense of security and safety, even comfort. These positive associations are why few would think of light as a source of pollution. Astronomers, perhaps, come to mind as an exception.

This is precisely where independent film-maker, director Ian Cheney started off with his most recent documentary The City Dark. As an astronomy-aficionado in his youth and born in a rural area, Cheney was disturbed by “the disappearance of the night sky” while living in New York. After talking to professional astronomers about the issue, Cheney realised that excessive light was a concern for other professionals too, from wildlife conservationists to health experts and designers. Too much illumination, in wrong places and at wrong times, can disorient and kill migratory birds and hatching turtles. It can potentially increase the risk of some types of cancer, and prevent astronomers from spotting “killer asteroids” that threaten our planet. Some of the experts interviewed in the documentary poetically noted that we lose sight of how small we are, and become alienated from the environment, the earth’s biosphere and the universe, as we lose sight of the night sky. This is how we humans have become so self-centred and now believe that the same rules and laws of nature don't apply to us.

It might not be as intimidating or spectacularly dangerous as climate change, disease or wars. But light pollution appeals more direclty to our senses. The City Dark manages to make an impact on the viewer precisely because it's delivered in a visual medium. Replete with striking images of stars and dark, cloudless night skies, Cheney’s point about the importance of connecting with the universe this way is compelling.

After it premiered in Texas in March 2011, The City Dark had its first Gulf showing last week in Doha, Qatar. Presented to a selected group of university students and staff at the beautiful Qatar Foundation Student Center, designed by architects Legorreta+Legorreta, a documentary about light pollution felt almost surreal. The Student Center is just one architectural masterpiece among many which form Doha’s Education City, a pioneering higher education and learning initiative of Her Highness Sheikha Mozah, Qatar’s First Lady. With Education City, Qatar’s ruling elite hopes to project the tiny country to the global map as having successfully fast-tracked itself into a knowledge society. Education City is located in the outskirts of booming Doha, in the middle ground between the bright city lights and the (at night) jet-black desert. In a way it is a continuation of the rapid and intensive urbanisation efforts that are driven by Qatar’s quest for economic diversification, moving away from the oil and gas sectors. At the same time, with its green initiatives, including LEED-certified student halls (which rank among the first in the country), Education City seeks to maintain the balance between the environment and development.

Qatar’s fast urbanisation, which feels much like “a century in thirty years”, has many parallels with the themes touched by Cheney’s documentary: the bright city lights are pushing away the desert and are forming new welfare generations that are increasingly disconnected from the desert skies and their roots in the harsh and but beautiful environment.

As pointed out in the Q&A session by Cheney, due to the still ongoing urbanisation and state-building process, Qatar has the opportunity to “get it right” from the beginning. This applies to light pollution as well as to urban planning in general. Unfortunately however, although there are little islands of greener planning (or “islands of efficiency”, a term coined by Steffen Hertog), like the Education City or the project to “restore” Doha’s old centre, much of urban development in Doha still has a chaotic feel to it. Doha’s now iconic skyline, an image of the West Bay sea of monumental skyscrapers has emerged from almost nothing in less than decade (see a picture from the mid-1980s).

Qatar’s fast growth is producing other types of contamination. The massive increase in heavy and energy industries and traffic has caused air pollution, construction (or “developmental activities”, as some prefer to call them) and waste have destroyed marine and terrestrial ecosystems and generated another nasty byproduct: noise. It's difficult to escape noise even at night in Doha. In its hurry to catch up with development, the city’s construction activities continue 24 hours a day. Throughout the night, fully lit-up skeletons of buildings dot the city’s roadsides, and the cacophony of heavy construction machinery echoes in most central neighbourhoods.

Like most people, The City Dark’s director Cheney is also an optimist. He believes that there is hope. Like smokestacks, which were once the symbol of the wealth of a society but which have come to represent pollution, Cheney hopes that electric light, the symbol of wealth in the past century, will succumb to the realisation that both the energy used to produce electricity and light itself require a more sustainable approach.

Tonight, turn the lights off and try to see if you can see stars. Then go and see Cheney’s documentary. The next Middle East showing will be at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in October.

Are Economics Spelling Our Doom?

2011-08-22T08:12:07Z

Mainstream Western neoclassical economic theory has caused strong reactions in the kitchen sociologist* in me this week. The more I understand it, the more disillusioned I become about its possibilities help us to prevent dangerous climate change. The reality is that, particularly in these times of crisis, economic considerations are salient in all decision-making. This often means that much of policy-making world-wide ends up being in fundamental conflict with trying to prevent a 2°C global temperature rise.

The negative feelings were stirred up by a book by Frank Ackerman titled Can We Afford the Future? The Economics of a Warming World from 2009, which I picked up from my university library. Ackerman, a well-known critic of conventional economic approaches to climate change from the Stockholm Environment Institute, makes several compelling observations that show the limits and problems of contemporary economics: Most importantly, certain things, like biodiversity and human life, are priceless. By way of an example, there is no way to put a numeric value on lives lost due to the droughts in Somalia, or on the potential complete disappearance of species like the Orange Spotted Grouper (commonly known as Hamour) from Gulf waters due to overfishing.

Secondly, contemporary economic calculations, based on discount rates, are generally incapable of dealing with long-term issues like climate change, which will span over centuries. And thirdly, action against climate change needs to be thought in terms of insurance: insuring our future, not in terms of cost-benefit analysis. According to Ackerman, climate economics starts going wrong right from the beginning by assuming that business as usual (or inaction) is a desirable state of affairs always if a cost-benefit analysis of a policy or an action does not indicate otherwise. To take an example from recent events, should Western governments become convinced that the financial costs of the UNFCCC’s Green Climate Fund (consisting of transfers from the developed to developing countries, amounting to US$100bn annually by 2020) will be higher than the total achieved financial benefits from the resulting mitigation and adaptation efforts, then they most likely should not strive to deliver those funds just yet. Away with notions of equity, responsibility and precautionary action; it’s just too expensive right now!

A similar logic applies governments and economists that suggest that it is better to wait for certain energy technologies, like renewables or CCS, to become economically more viable in relation to fossil fuels before large-scale employment. Meanwhile, the invisible hand of technology development will take care of climate change mitigation. Dubai at least seems to think along these latter lines, if judged by its recent, rather embarrassing 1% renewable energy target by 2020. (For a comparison, similarly fossil fuel-poor Morocco is aiming at 42% of total installed capacity by 2020.)

Like myself, Ackerman belongs those of us who thinks that "the status quo is not an option". Our business as usual is taking us to dangerous climate change. He argues that while climate policy must continue to be based on sound economic knowledge, what needs to change is the set of values that guides choices between different options. Fighting and solving climate change, ultimately, as Ackerman expresses it, consists of “ethical and political judgements about what we can and should do for each other today, and for the generations that will follow us”.

I’m sure most people can agree with this. Most will, nevertheless, also dismiss Ackerman’s message as idealistic and far removed from reality. Here we arrive at the core problem of climate change: not only in economic theory, but more generally, in the much-spoken global shift to a low-carbon economy, the risk of losing money in the short term still seems to be considered by our decision-makers as the greatest risk of all. Not global inequality, the destruction of species, biodiversity, human lives—or even the entire planet.

Sustainable development in most societies still predominantly translates, in the minds of businessmen and decision-makers, into economic, rather than environmental, sustainability. This is of course most apparent in developing countries where socioeconomic development and fighting poverty comes first on the agenda (and partly justifiably so). Particularly in the MENA region, the economic crisis, coupled with the Arab Spring, is reinforcing the regional tendency to keep forgetting this “other ‘E’”. Most standing Arab governments now regard economic sustainability as more crucial than ever. From Morocco to the United Arab Emirates, maintenance of the status quo is sought through controlled political openings, but it is the governments that have been able to afford to throw money at the problem through price freezes and increased public and welfare spending who have been the most successful in (re-)establishing stability—for the time being.

This process, in which securing short-term economic security becomes perceived as pronouncedly important, notions of social and environmental sustainability (saving natural resources and enabling sustained wealth and welfare for future generations by tackling the current energy and lifestyle-related environmental problems) are in a real danger of getting largely sidelined.

As said, confronted by the financial crisis and related popular unrest and protest, avoiding short-term economic losses seems to be the prevailing logic determining most government responses to the issue of climate change, not only in Dubai but elsewhere in the world too. If this weren’t the case, we would not be steadily heading towards three or four degrees of global warming. As recently noted by Christina Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Convention, there is currently a 40% gap between emission reduction pledges and the 2-degree limit. Most worryingly, unlike Ackerman who wrote his book before the 2008 downturn, given the economic realities, I don’t see an alternative model of thinking, “a better economics”, taking over anytime soon—and definitely not in time for the COP-17 meeting in Durban. Someone please disprove my fears.

* Back in my undergraduate times, pretending to be scientific while analysing anything from consumer habits to global injustices used to be called kitchen sociology.

Becoming an Ant in A Waste Land

2011-08-08T10:00:00Z

One of the major factors in moving towards more environmentally sustainable lifestyles and consumer societies is that of cost and, consequently, incentive. A lot also depends on whether the society we live in, with its laws, regulations, customs and practices, pushes us towards more sustainable choices. It’s not just people’s values or government decisions that can make a change. It’s a bit of both.

Since moving to Doha a week ago, I have been forced to reflect on my own behaviour as a consumer. It is easy here to become just another dweller in the ant hill: do what everyone else does and forget about better practices devised and implemented elsewhere.

Having travelled and conducted fieldwork in the Gulf, the Americanised way of living here was no novelty for me. Previously, however, I was able to sniff at the wastage taking place around me; after all, I was just visiting and not permanently participating in the consumption festival.

This time, however, by deciding to move here, I have become part of the problem.

Starting from my flat... Qatari expatriates live large. My flat size grew overnight from 36 square meters to 100 plus. With exceptionally high August temperatures, air conditioning feels like a vital necessity. As I’m writing this, it’s +43 Celsius outside. Air conditioning is needed not only in homes, but everywhere else, too, from offices to shopping centres, as well as in cars. Also,I’m guessing a very large part of the heat is wasted due to bad insulation and over-cooling. On top of it all, many of Qatar’s more fortunate residents never see a utility bill. Natural gas in Qatar, used for both electricity and water desalination, is plentiful—the country having been endowed with the world’s third largest natural gas reserves (13.5% of the global total). Electricity, water and waste fees of expatriates are often paid by their employers. For Qataris, electricity and water are free of charge. Unlike in most other countries, here the economic and environmental costs of modern living are effectively hidden away.

Moving on to cars: On Doha’s streets, the bigger your car is, the better. Against my will, I shifted from being a cyclist and wintertime tram-rider to being the proprietor of a large family car. I can barely see over the hood and still I’m already thinking of switching to a small SUV. Here the choice is not between private and public transport, but rather getting around or staying home. Roads have not been made with the pedestrian or biker in mind (neither are the summer temperatures), and the public transport system is still in its very early phases. Another real concern is staying safe. One easily feels small and intimidated by the massive SUVs, Hummers and other large-ego vehicles speeding on the streets and highways. An amazingly large share of vehicles circulating on Doha’s wide and long roads consists of SUVs. This creates a vicious cycle: people moving here buy big cars too. And big cars obviously consume more petrol. Since we are in a country that, despite its tiny size (smaller than Montenegro or Vanuatu), owns 1.9% of the world’s proven oil reserves, petrol here flows cheap. Exactly EUR0.19 euros or £0.17 a litre. Now who would even think about saving or buying a greener car with these prices?

Finally, waste and recycling: many green expats’ favourite topic to pick at. The lack of recycling facilities and the excessive use of packing material, plastic bags and plastic bottles is what most European expatriates tend to notice when they move here. The camel and the plastic bag have become an emblem of this "new" awareness. My first contact with tiny, soda can-sized plastic bottles in which water is offered instead of water coolers or tap water in my workplace coincided with a news article in Abu Dhabi’s The National reporting that each UAE resident uses as many as 450 plastic bottles per year. Lifestyles and consumption patterns here in Qatar are practically the same, so, with a population of around 1.7 million, this country can be estimated to throw away a whopping 765 million plastic bottles each year.

The amount of waste is a problem, but even worse is that it’s not reused. In addition to the obviously serious lack of awareness of environmental issues, and the lack of effort put into separating, collecting and reprocessing infrastructure for waste, suspicion is a big problem. I have seen green boxes for paper recycling here at my office, but scepticism regarding the fate of their contents seems to nibble away the credibility of even this laudable small-scale project. Water usage patterns are also affected: apart from taste, an important motivator for drinking bottled water is that people believe that tap water, made by desalinating water, is not safe (despite the authorities assuring otherwise).

There are a few common denominators to all this wasting: the climate, the resource glut and the fast societal transformation. It’s a hot, arid country, with a small population and seemingly limitless fossil fuel riches. Oil will be enough for at least another five-six decades and natural gas reserves are expected to last for up to 300 years at current production rates. The country has experienced massive urbanisation, population growth and internationalisation of its demographics in only a few decades.

There’s not much that can be done about the first two things. As for the third , while Qatar’s fast development, increasing globalisation and its wish to be seen as a modern state is already bringing in environmental sustainability thinking on the government agenda, people’s habits and values tend to stick. Qatar has very recently moved from dirt poor to the richest country in the world in per capita terms. Getting used to the new wealth and seeing beyond the bling will take its time. Here, however, the government can play a crucial role. After all, with that incentive system built around us, all we expatriate ants can do is write encouraging blogs and keep placing our paper in those little green boxes.

The 2011 Gulf Research Meeting

2011-07-19T08:00:00Z

When we talk about climate change adaptation in developing countries, are we talking about climate change? If not, what should we be talking about? These were among the questions I personally took home from a colourful workshop last week, which focused on the impacts of climate change on the Gulf region.

On 6-9 July, the formerly Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, an independent research institute, organised its second Gulf Research Meeting in Cambridge. Reflecting rising academic interest in this subregion as well as the mushrooming of its local education sectors, the meeting drew together around 300 participants specialising in areas as diverse as foreign relations, healthcare, innovation and migration. The workshop on climate change itself was also a sign of the times, appearing as a freestanding theme with eleven papers presented as part of it (none of which touched upon the issue of response measures, or the negative impacts of international mitigation). Gulf studies at least—if not all Gulf states themselves—are indeed waking up to impending adaptation-related challenges.

Presentations in our workshop were broadly of three types: those exploring the negative impacts of climate change (on water security, biodiversity, land reclamation, border disputes, tourism and state failure); those presenting adaptation strategies (water management, drought-resistant crops and switching to natural gas); and those evaluating early climate change responses (mitigation-related projects, mostly in the wealthier states of the region).

What caught my attention regarding the impacts of climate change was that most speakers were actually talking about something other than climate change -- something already subject to the negative impacts from other human-induced phenomena. Climate change is generally simply expected to make things worse.

For example, both biodiversity and water security have been under severe stress since the beginning of the oil era in the Middle East, and particularly in the Gulf. The boom of the 2000s, with its Palms and Pearls, desalination, dredging and digging, caused damage of an immeasurable scale to local marine ecosystems. Probably few, if any, of the areas where massive land manipulation has taken place were studied by impartial scientists beforehand. Scientific data on the region's ecosystems is only now - slowly - beginning to accumulate. Preserving for the future requires knowledge about the present. And as my colleague Mohamed Raouf has noted, it is difficult to compensate for environmental damage if we don't even know what has been damaged. Reclaimed land areas (which one of the presenters cleverly suggested might strain already tense foreign relations between neighbouring states like the UAE and Iran) could in turn be threatened by rising sea-levels, but were these low-lying money-magnets really made to last for long in the first place?

Increasing environmental degradation, eroding water security due to "development activities", and unmanaged agriculture-related water exploitation are arguably much worse environmental security threats than climate change. They are occurring now; their causes are known (and increasingly openly admitted) and impacts are felt today.

Water security, particularly in poorer countries like Yemen and Syria, is reaching a critical point; a complex mix of socioeconomic, cultural and political factors continues to impede effective demand-side management. The only effective supply-side solutions are either too expensive (desalination), or may come too late due to slow government responses and/or lack of capacity (e.g. wastewater treatment and recycling).

The adaptation strategies presented, too, were primarily techniques and technologies devised to target pressing human-induced pressures on natural resources, including rapid population growth and water mismanagement. Indeed environmental degradation is likely to be accelerated by climate change. Luckily the remedies are largely the same. In the case of ecosystems, if countries pay more attention to preserving what is currently left of local biodiversity, the future perspective will follow naturally. In the case of water, as the Lebanese professor Hamed Assaf has argued, current water management related problems -- "high water demand, negligence of water quality, and over-pumping" -- are much more urgent challenges than climate change. However, addressing these also means adapting to potentially even scarcer water resources and less predictable weather events in the future.

Finally, many in the group agreed that the most of the largely laudable responses to climate change that we have witnessed in past years in, for example, Abu Dhabi (the United Arab Emirates) and Qatar, have risen from a range of motives. These include economic diversification, attracting foreign investment, building a knowledge economy and regional prestige. In a way, many of them also contribute to the state's capacity to adapt to the impacts of climate change mitigation, but not necessarily climate change itself. Adaptation thinking even in these more proactive states is still in its early stages.

It turned out that, without fully noticing it, our workshop actually spent two days talking about a range of underlying societal problems and challenges, which may or may not in the coming decades be intensified by climate change. Our discussions actually largely centred around the issue of natural security—a brilliant concept coined in 2009 by Sharon Burke from the Center for a New American Security to describe the intertwined consequences of natural resource consumption (energy, minerals, water, arable land) on the environment (climate change, biodiversity).

Another security-related concept, also coined by Americans, describes climate change as "a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world." Although "security" definitely needs to be extended to include human security (and the dangers of securitisation should not be forgotten), in my opinion, these two concepts could help us refocus our attempts at trying to grasp present and future challenges.

Climate change in the Middle East is expected to complicate existing challenges relating to water, food, economic growth, migration, among others. Governments there need to begin by targeting existing challenges, including unsustainable agriculture-related incentive systems, the so-called rentier mentality, lack of accountability and transparency in environmental impact assessments and natural resource-related state failure in Yemen -- to name just a few. By addressing present natural security, with human security in mind, the region will be better equipped to cope with the future climate change challenges.

Saudi Arabia In Need of Alignment

2011-07-04T11:49:00Z

Besides more serious domestic issues like the Arab Spring or women driving, Saudi Arabia is steadily drifting towards an increasingly untenable situation in its relationship with climate change. The Kingdom’s nascent domestic climate policy is becoming detached from its long-held obstructionist international climate policy posture. The questions are: does the government care, and should it?

For two decades now, Saudi has rather proudly carried the mantle of number one obstructionist in international climate negotiations, which take place under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In climate geek circles the country is notoriously famous for its long-standing and experienced negotiating team, said to have been trained by the US oil lobby back in the 1990s. Indeed Saudi and oil lobby interests are essentially the same, aiming at stretching out the global oil era as far as possible. Nowadays, however, the Saudi team acts independently; there is little need for external assistance when your chief negotiator has (apparently) attended each and every annual Conference of Parties (and a great share of the intersessional meetings too) since they began in the mid-1990s.

As always, there are two sides to the story. Saudi and its OPEC fellows say they are “faithfully engaging” in the negotiations (also a nice choice of words for the Guardian of the Holy Places). Pretty much everyone else, however, seems to think Saudi is only interested in delays, discord and trouble.

The last round of UNFCCC negotiations that ended in mid-June was no exception: a briefing paper by the Finnish think tank FIIA described Saudi Arabia as thriving “on the procedural conflicts” and being “clever at utilizing the political space that opens up when big players are in disagreement.” During the two weeks of negotiations the Saudi team also received the most daily “Fossil of the Day” awards from the NGO alliance Climate Action Network.

Despite having a clear international policy, Saudi Arabia still has no actual domestic climate policy (as is, to my knowledge, the case for the entire Middle East). In recent years and months, however, there have been a number of announcements signalling a change from within. These could one day be picked up by the top echelons and transformed into official targets and policies. Recent examples of these include oil minister Ali al-Naimi’s June speech on “the Saudi Arabia of Solar Electricity”. achieved by generating solar electricity equalling the amount of energy from its oil exports. In April, the GreenProphet blog reported on a statement attributed to a vague source, alleging the country’s national solar capacity goal had been set at a massive 20 GW by 2030. Last week, another vague source was quoted in the local press as declaring that the kingdom had a solar target of 5 GW by 2020. Nuclear is also on the agenda.

If Saudi in the coming months or years decides to go proactive and announce a domestic alternative energy target, it would (naturally) not be an internationally binding one. A developing country (or a country classified as developing by the UNFCCC back in 1992) would never commit internationally unless there were strong guarantees of tangible support from the global North. Currently, developing country targets are probably announced for two main reasons: they can be part of national mitigation plans, drafted in exchange for assistance from developed countries, or they can be announced for the sake of something more intangible like solidarity or prestige.

A domestic Saudi target would definitely fall into the latter category. It could be either for renewables only or for “clean energy”, which would also include “dirty” things like nuclear energy and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. Somewhat differently from Abu Dhabi, where renewable energy plans are linked to a defined technology transfer agenda, Saudi Arabia’s alternative energy target is likely to come as a byproduct of the country’s swelling domestic electricity needs. There is plenty of oil but too little natural gas to power a 27-million nation with massive plans to diversify the economy in heavy industries like petrochemicals. This is why Saudi is mulling nuclear energy—and solar in a longer term.

Any alternative energy target therefore would be primarily tied to domestic energy security, but there is a clear link to the issue of climate change too: adapting to climate change mitigation will eventually require replacing oil revenues with something else. Solar is perhaps the strongest candidate when it comes to the rulers’ dream of preserving the existing social contract.

My argument is there is a problem with the country’s international policy becoming detached from domestic developments. Some might counter with the suggestion that in climate policy, these two are not necessarily connected: a country may have a lot going on domestically (the US is the prime example), but for one reason or another (domestic politics, economics, competitiveness, policy dominance by one bureaucracy) it might be reluctant or not feel the need to engage to a similar extent in the international regime.

The bottom line, however, is that Saudi Arabia has accrued its wealth with the export of a product with negative environmental externalities, and the time to pay has come. Saudi has the wealth to buy the technology and expertise needed to adapt to this transition. The sooner it stops fighting against the current in the UNFCCC, the better for its international image. And international image, as we have seen in the case of Abu Dhabi’s alternative energy projects, can make the transition to low-carbon a lot faster and smoother. Should the government care? That depends on how much it's prepared to do now for the future.

Managing the Risk of Energy Uncertainty

2011-06-21T08:57:00Z

AMID frustrated messages from my colleagues on the lack of meaningful progress in the latest round of UN climate talks, which closed last week in Bonn, there were two partly related headlines that caught my attention. The first was a widely reported and extensive Stanford University study. It concluded that in the

The UAE Petrol Shortage

2011-06-10T22:28:00Z

Petrol has been this week’s number one news topic in the United Arab Emirates. Not the rising international oil prices, nor the failed OPEC meeting behind them, but events at the local pump. For the third time in a year, petrol stations across the northern emirates have faced supply restrictions and many have sold out.

Low Carbon Development And Authoritarianism

2011-05-27T10:05:00Z

Developed countries, mostly democratic ones, have created the problem of climate change. International climate politics rests on this premise. However, the emphasis of future mitigation and adaptation will lie with developing countries, many of them authoritarian. Among the largest greenhouse gas-emitting countries are