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COASTAL DEVELOPMENT IN DUBAI RAISES INTEREST, CONCERNS
By Jackie Colognesi
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates-The city of Dubai boasts the only seven-star hotel in the world, will soon claim the world’s tallest building, and is currently undergoing so much construction that 16 percent of the world’s cranes call Dubai home.
Quickly becoming one of the world’s biggest luxury tourist destinations, Dubai, the size of Rhode Island, has only has 45 miles of natural coastline. According to their website, Nakheel, a Dubai-based real estate developer, plans to add 312 miles to this coastline--by building man-made islands so large that they can be seen from space.
Called the The Palm Trilogy, The World, and the Dubai Waterfront, all three developments will stretch more than two billion feet over the Persian Gulf when completed. They will be home to luxury apartment buildings and mansions as well as high-end hotels and upscale shopping centers.
“The Palm and World Islands are symbols of personal wealth,” said Joe Dreisbach, 21, a senior finance and economics major at Marist College.
“They’re a combination of convenience and extravagance. You can live on one of the Palms, have waterfront property and still only be a mile outside of the city center. Some of the World Islands are only selling for $1.4 million -you can buy $1.4 million waterfront property in the U.S., but you’re not getting your own island,” he added.
Lisa Kendall, 27, a resident of Dubai, is less thrilled with the amount of development. “The whole city is one big construction site so it is very polluted, and dusty,” said Kendall. “It is difficult to even walk outside because of the poor air quality.” Kendall said that Dubai’s inland construction was sufficient, adding that the islands were “totally unnecessary” and were “only being built to suit multimillionaires.”
The giant islands, which are created from sand dredged up from the bottom of the Gulf, have environmentalists upset. It seems that the region, which the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) already calls Dubai “the world’s biggest ecological footprint” due to the fact that in just 30 years, the United Arab Emirates went from a traditional economy based on agriculture and livestock to a highly urbanized area. The WWF believes that the region’s beaches and marine life cannot take the added stress of Nakheel’s developments.
Khamis Juma Bu-Amim, chairman of the board of the Region Clean Sea Organisation, told the Khaleej Times Online in October 2007 that 37 percent of marine damage in the Persian Gulf is attributable to urban development. Much concern lies with the second Palm Island to be constructed in the Gulf, Palm Jebel Ali.
Construction was finished on the first Palm, Jumeirah, in 2006. Palm Jumeirah, which is one and a half times the size of New York’s Central Park, according to Nakheel’s website, was constructed over a mainly sedimentary rocky base that had a limited fish population. The construction site for Palm Jebel Ali, slated to be 50 percent bigger than Palm Jumeirah, includes that of the Jebel Ali Marine Reserve. The reserve is home to various species of fish and over 20 unique kinds of coral.
Professor Joseph J. Valencic, an oceanographer and researcher with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, Ca, developed a series on the Palm Islands with National Geographic last year. Valencic stated on his website that “the dredging and sedimentation cover in [the Jebel Ali construction site] will do irreversible damage to the pre-construction rich coral marine environment.”
An avid diver who has been diving off of Dubai’s coast for the past three years, Ibrahim Bashir has said that the water quality has dropped due to all of the construction.
“It was once very clear, with visibility of up to 10 meters,” he told the Middle East Times in July 2007. “But now you sometimes can’t even see the tip of your hand.”
Bashir’s concern is echoed within the Marist College community. Maxine Presto, 19, a biology major at Marist College, said, “The economic benefit for [these islands] pales in comparison to the damage being done to the environment. I’m opposed to anything that harms the environment just for the sake of luxury.”
“We need to address the fact that we are living in a unique time. Scientists are saying that we only have a small window of opportunity in which we can try to reverse some of the effects of global warming,” she added. “If [these islands] are being built now, it’s going to create a huge problem.”
Nakheel, whose motto is “Where the vision of Dubai gets built,” is taking some measures to ensure environmental sustainability, such as installing reef-monitoring tiles at the Jebel Ali construction site and preventing divers from entering the area. Environmental groups remain unsatisfied, and the question that remains is what will happen when all the tourists start pouring in.
“Over-fishing is also a threat,” Ibrahim N Al Zu’bi, an adviser with the Emirates Diving Association, a United Nations Environment Programee, told the Khaleej Times in October 2007. “Littering has become rampant. The Arabian Gulf is an asset to us…but it’s unfortunate that developments along the coastline in addition to a tremendous growth in human population along the shores are posing a great danger to the marine environment.”