Get sustainable or go under, Nakheel warns

A number of Gulf developers are simply paying "lip service" to the issue of sustainability and are at a "superficial level in terms of their promises", the CEO of Nakheel has admitted during this year's Cityscape property expo in Dubai.

"Lots of people are paying lip service to this issue [sustainability]. A few want to change things and change the region's culture on sustainability," Chris O'Donnell told Arabian Business. "Some developers are at a superficial level in terms of their promises of sustainability."

However, O'Donnell said that the "tipping point" would occur when "everyone else starts doing it properly".

"They will either be forced to upgrade their product offerings or perish. Remember when seatbelts first started appearing in cars or airbags, not every car had them, now all of them do. It is a marketing edge but also a must for any quality developer."

Six months ago Nakheel carried out an international sustainability group analysis to identify positive and negative elements in its sustainability planning going through the business's entire social, economic and environmental framework and followed this by putting in place an improvement programme.

"Nakheel is well advanced in sustainability planning but what we weren't good at was collecting all that information together with everything we'd been doing over the years," said O'Donnell.

"The good thing is that everything we do is new therefore we can influence the way things are designed to create the most sustainable environment anywhere in the world."

O'Donnell's comments follow calls from Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, for the Gulf real estate sector to seriously address sustainability issues if it wants to deliver US$500bn worth of regional developments planned over the next seven years.

"These planned developments will require an additional two million cubic metres of water per day, 75 million additional megawatt hours of energy per year, all while producing an additional 3.5 million tonnes of solid waste and 300 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year", Al Jaber said. "This level of growth is not sustainable."

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