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Damian Reilly talks to Dr. Mohammed Raouf, the Gulf Research Centre’s senior environment researcher, about golf courses, ski slopes and desalination plants.
Who’d want to be an ecologist in the UAE? Dr. Mohammed Raouf is a patient and mild-mannered man, but even he must sometimes think his job is an impossible one. In the history of humanity, has anyone ever listened to an environmentalist when there is money to be made?
Dr. Raouf is the senior environment researcher at highly respected Dubai-based think tank the Gulf Research Centre. He believes the UAE is trying too hard to defy nature, and that nature in the end will exact a terrible price in return. “You cannot defeat nature,” is his mantra, albeit one that is delivered shyly, eyes crinkled behind his glasses, while he doodles on the pad in front of him.
Raouf thinks it is high time the UAE got back to living in harmony with its natural environment and ecosystem rather than trying to shape, at any cost, the environment to its own ends. To put it bluntly, the golf courses and the artificial islands worry Raouf, as do the water desalination plants and the nuclear power aims.
He says: “If you look at history you see that great civilisations manage to deal with their environment. They adapted to and accepted their ecosystems. Natural resources are the real wealth of nations. You have to accept your environment. The whole Arab region comes with a severe ecological deficit. We have no water, we don’t have rivers and forests, but then we are blessed with oil and gas and solar energy. You have to accept your system and live in harmony with it.”
At the start of our interview, Raouf brings up the subject of ‘greenifying’ the desert, by which he means the practice of trying to grow crops on the sand. This way, it quickly becomes clear, he thinks madness lies. Raouf explains that this greenifying is something the Saudis have been doing for decades (planting wheat), and to some extent it has occurred, too, in the UAE. It is an initiative, he says, borne of a desire to achieve food security and self reliance. But it’s not an achievable aim.
“You can’t keep planting in the desert. We don’t have arable lands. We have very limited water resources, yet we have increasing demand for it. The UAE has also to balance the allocation of all resources, but the most precious resource is water. You have to accept the ecosystem. You have to accept the system like it is, and benefit from it. Look at energy security: other countries don’t have their own energy supplies, so they import them from this region. It is the same situation with this region’s food security.
“No one said you have to achieve food security locally. But what has happened is that as a result of this agriculture and food security, they have used most of the underground water. Many aquifers and wells are dried, or salinised, or polluted as a result of excessive exploitation for agriculture.”
Over the last few years, the UAE has started buying tracts of fertile land in places like the Philippines, Pakistan and Sudan which can be farmed. This move, Raouf says, is a “wise” policy.
Arabian Insight asks Raouf if he is not being a bit bleeding heart about the water issue. After all, the UAE sits on the seashore, and today we have the technology to desalinate the sea water at will, until it is quite delicious to drink, let alone to use for growing crops.
The question causes him to jerk his head up from over his notepad and widen his eyes, sending his eyebrows heavenwards: “We have a big problem! Water is very scarce here. Rainfall is tiny. We can desalinate, but that requires a lot of energy, and that causes a lot of environmental damage, whether from intakes or outtakes. We don’t have a good solution, we have to go for desalination, but you have to reduce all the negative environmental impact. Because many of the desalination plants were built 30 to 40 years ago, and they are not efficient and they are damaging the marine environment.
“The marine environment is very sensitive and we are promoting the region as a tourism destination. But the coastline is being destroyed.”
Raouf complains that the attitude to water in the UAE, and the Gulf in general, is very wasteful. He says the region, which is home to 65 percent of the world’s desalination plants, is the second highest per capita consumer of water in the world, after the USA. That’s a dubious accolade when that water costs a dollar per cubic metre to desalinate and the GCC consumes three billion cubic metres of it a year (2005).
In fact, Raouf will go as far as to imply that there is something un-Islamic about wasteful use of water: “It is very deeply rooted in the Islamic and Arabic culture to take care of the environment, and water. During the Islamic preparation for praying, when we wash, Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) used to wash with only one litre of water. He said many times that when you wash on the river bank that has been going for centuries, you must conserve water, even if you have a plentiful supply. We have many citations about the importance of conserving water.”
To emphasise the importance of conserving water, Raouf hypothesises about how the UAE would cope in the eventuality of a “catastrophe.” Dubai, he says, has very little in the way of stockpiled water, pointing out that its desalinated water fit for drinking goes directly from plant to consumption. The situation in Abu Dhabi, he reckons, is slightly less dire. There is a lag of about a week between water production and consumption. Sensing panic in Arabian Insight, Raouf is quick to point out that the situation immediately after an unforeseen calamity might not be as serious as it potentially could be: “If we ran out of water, people would not die. There is a solution, to transport water from neighbouring countries, like Pakistan and Turkey and Egypt. If catastrophe happened, such as an earthquake, we would be backed somehow,” he says.
Chief amongst Raouf’s gripes about the way the UAE has developed is what he terms a “copy and paste” culture. By this he means the lifting of leisure activities that are viable in, for example, Europe, and imitating them in the Gulf. Specifically, he is referring to the UAE’s myriad golf courses (which use millions of gallons of water), or the ski slope in the Mall of the Emirates.
He says: “They want to copy and paste. We have other good things here, and the world is built on diversity, diversity is beautiful, but they see golf courses in Germany and so they want them here. But we have our own activities here we could do. The golf courses are very expensive and they consume a lot of water, so they are not a good solution.”
He is also very worried about the impact on the environment of the artificial islands that are being constructed off the UAE’s coastline, islands that he says may eventually face severe problems if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s grim prediction that sea levels will rise by 40-60cm in the next 50 years transpires: “In my opinion it was a very unwise decision. One Palm maybe, I can accept that, but to build so many? Along the whole coast of Dubai we have three Palms, and the World, and Maritime City and we have Dubai Waterfront. All those artificial islands. The point of them is economic. But what is this doing to marine life? There was a plan before the economic crisis to build canals inland. How can you justify that environmentally? It must be for economic reasons.”
He adds that paying the local environment no notice in pursuit of short-term profit will eventually be self-defeating: “People come here to see the coral reefs. It is a tourism asset. If you are building along the whole coast, then definitely you are damaging the environment. They are building now because they found it is very profitable now, but in ten years, 100 years, you will lose the asset. If we destroy all the marine life, all the coral reefs, then we lose this asset. Coral reefs take 500 years to grow.”
Towards the end of the interview, Raouf mentions that the GCC is responsible for 2.4 percent of worldwide carbon emissions. Arabian Insight asks him what he thinks of plans to produce nuclear energy in the region. He is not a fan; his environmentalist sensibilities cannot endorse an energy source that is non-renewable. Add to that, he argues that should anything go wrong in the production stage, the effect on the UAE’s environment could be disastrous. And, of course, he points out there is still no way to effectively get rid of nuclear waste.
He is just as worried, if not more so, by Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Their Bushehr nuclear facility is right on the Gulf coast, it is closer to Gulf cities than to Tehran. The water circulation in the Gulf is anti-clockwise. So, should any leakage happen, all the problem will come to the other side, which is us. The water is very sensitive. The technology is Russian which is not so advanced, so there are a lot of potential hazards.”
Iran and its nuclear ambitions aside, Raouf is not totally pessimistic. He believes the UAE has time to change its ways and make good the environmental damage he says it has already done. Now he has just has to make himself heard.
