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Eco global survival framed glass12/28/2022 The first is Jebel Ali, home to a busy man-made port as well as an enormous industrial plant belonging to Dubai Electric and Water Authority (DEWA). Two places on Dubai’s 40-mile-long coast frame its astonishing trajectory. Many people I met on a recent visit to Dubai, including Rostock and Alam, believe the city might actually pull that off.Īnd if it can happen here, they say, it can happen anywhere. He wants it to have the smallest carbon footprint in the world. He has decreed that his city will get 75 percent of its energy from clean sources by 2050. In Dubai, the “leadership” is His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the 67-year-old hereditary emir, aka the Ruler. “The leadership has recognized that the growth of the economy is not sustainable without taking action on emissions,” says Tanzeed Alam, climate director for the Emirates Wildlife Society, WWF’s local partner. Further out in the desert, Dubai is building a giant solar power plant that will soon be producing some of the cheapest and cleanest electricity on Earth. On Dubai’s southern outskirts, a new housing development has opened-called Sustainable City-that recycles its water and waste and produces more energy than it consumes. Gleaming driverless metro trains now run the length of the linear city, alongside Sheikh Zayed Road, carrying about as many people, and often faster, as the cars on that clogged 12-lane artery. Photographs by Luca Locatelli, INSTITUTE for National Geographic A surprising number are Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and other gorgeous gas hogs.Īnd yet, something else has happened since 2006: Dubai has started to change. The number of cars on its roads has more than doubled. In the decade since, the city’s population has doubled, to more than 2.8 million. The shoe certainly fit Dubai, the most conspicuous consumer among the seven emirates. In 2006 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) declared the United Arab Emirates the country with the largest ecological footprint, per capita, largely because of its carbon emissions. And to create more beachfront for more luxury hotels and villas, it buried coral reefs under immense artificial islands. To keep the taps running in all those buildings, it essentially boils hundreds of Olympic pools worth of seawater every day. Indoor skiing is just a symbol: Dubai burns far more fossil fuel to air-condition its towers of glass. The boom years made the city a poster child for the excess that results when cheap energy meets environmental indifference. Sustainable? Dubai? When camels fly, you might say. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īnd yet a sustainable city is precisely what Dubai’s government says it aims to create. “From the point of view of sustainability you probably wouldn’t have done it here,” says Janus Rostock, a prominent architect transplanted from Copenhagen. Then oil and a wild real estate boom transformed it into a city that sports the world’s tallest building, one of its densest collections of skyscrapers, and its third busiest airport. What kind of human settlement makes sense in such a place? For centuries Dubai was a fishing village and trading port, small and poor. There is next to no soil suitable for growing crops. Yet it rarely rains Dubai gets less than four inches a year. The humidity is stifling then, because of the proximity of the sea. It didn’t feel quite as cold as minus eight (14☏) on the slope, but the temperature outside can get close to 50 (122☏) in summer. The souvenir T-shirt I bought bears a cartoon of a Celsius thermometer. You begin to marvel then at what air-conditioning can do, when pushed to its limits. Passing a mural of the Alps, you zip up your parka, pull on your gloves. Inside, you can window-shop at Prada, Dior, and Alexander McQueen before pushing through the glass doors of Ski Dubai. Smack in the middle of the flat city, the slope looks like a silver spaceship impaled in the ground floor of the Mall of the Emirates. To plunge headlong into the audacity of Dubai-the sprawling efflorescence of concrete, glass, and steel that has sprung up over the past three decades on the scorched sands of Arabia-you could start by going skiing.
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