A desert of unsustainability

Dubai may have oil and BurgerFuel but it's madness.

I have recently come home from an overseas trip to South Asia and Europe.

The lasting memory is of endless airport lounges and flights with aircraft full to the brim with travellers.

It seems the whole world is on the move and, indeed, the numbers of people flying is rapidly increasing. So much so that many airport terminals are barely coping and when several hundred people arrive in the space of a few minutes the waiting lines are huge, as immigration and security checks take time.

As Asian countries - and, in particular, the large nations of India and China - grow wealthier, increasing numbers of their citizens are on the move.

It is not always for tourism or business trips. Dubai, for example, has tens of thousands of guest workers who come from places like the Philippines, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to do all the jobs that the locals do not want to do. Given the 40C shade temperature for much of the year, that means pretty much anything outside, or away from air conditioning.

I found that Dubai - for me, anyway - is a totally unsustainable place. A huge city built in the desert with practically no rainfall and unbearably hot for much of the year. If it weren't for oil, the whole place would become a ghost town. It even has an indoor skifield - how crazy is that.

Workers' salaries are tax-free, along with vehicles, fuel, and just about everything.

The huge international airport is now almost as busy as Heathrow in London which is Europe's busiest. It does not have a curfew while Heathrow does - nevertheless, they are planning a second airport, not to replace the current one but to supplement it.

With the latest Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change report just out, with its dire warnings about carbon dioxide levels and, in particular, coal-fired power stations needing to be shut down and replaced with something less harmful, we should be taking notice. But, as with the past 20 years, I fear nothing much will change and we will hope that someone else will save our bacon and we can just carry on business as usual.

The deniers will say all the many scientists are wrong and there is nothing to worry about. It's just cyclical and has happened many times in the past. Unfortunately, this change is taking place really fast over a few comparatively short decades, not centuries.

Governments work in three-year cycles in New Zealand and sometimes for six or nine, but are seemingly uninterested in what is likely to happen by 2050 regarding planet warming, sea level rise, storm/drought cycles etc.

In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is just one of a number of mini states that do not even have political election cycles to worry about. They should be able to plan more easily for a long-term sustainable future, but there is no sign of it at present - in fact, just the opposite.

Ridgway Lythgoe is a retired Department of Conservation officer, keen environmentalist, tramper and traveller.