I’m Dreaming of a Green Dubai (or at Least Some Clean Beaches)

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  03.02.09 | 11:16 AM ET

It’s been a rough few months of sewage-on-the-beach damage control for the city of excess and $25,000-a-night hotel suites on artificial islands shaped like palm trees. After raw sewage, chemical waste and toilet paper washed up on opulent, luxury hotel-lined Jumeirah Beach and made international headlines, an environmental group is trying to clean up the beach and others along the United Arab Emirates coastline. The Emirates Wildlife Association will encourage managers of the beaches to apply for a Blue Flag designation and meet international standards for water quality and cleanliness.

Environmentalists have regularly gasped at Dubai’s energy-guzzling and biosphere-destroying excess, especially with its tourist accommodations, so I welcome the eco-sense. We’ll see if it works and if this small step will translate into Dubai using the lull in ravenous construction due to the global recession to reassess and revamp its environmental policies. (Am I just dreaming that we’ll make a better world, just you and me and the UAE? Probably, but, hey, I’m a sunny kind of woman.)

Meanwhile, just an hour’s drive away, Abu Dhabi is building solar-powered, car-free, carbon-neutral and zero-waste Masdar City. Makes Dubai look very 1980s.

Tags: Beaches, Eco Travel, Islands, Middle East, United Arab Emirates, Dubai, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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