Desert dreams - a fragile reality

 

By day three in Dubai I had developed the air-con cough. Not a virus — just the inevitable consequence of living inside a constant, refrigerated cocoon. Step outside and the heat hits like an opened furnace door. Step back in and your lungs tighten in protest at the mechanical chill. It is the rhythm of the place: scorch and soothe, glare and gloss.

UAE’s centrepiece city exists in defiance of its geography. In temperature terms alone, it is one of the least hospitable urban environments on Earth — and in a warming world, it will only become hotter. Yet the rate of construction is astonishing. Towers rise as fast as cranes can swing them into place; whole districts seem to materialise between breakfast and dinner.

Of course, it is built on extraordinary wealth and the dreamlike availability of oil. Dubai is an artificial oasis — a monument not merely to human ingenuity, but to humanity’s refusal to confront the climate problem of its own making. A glittering dystopia where the insidious power of hydrocarbons is rendered in glass, steel and relentless development.

Approaching the oasis

Even before descending to Dubai International Airport, the contradictions are visible from 35,000 feet.

On my flight we passed near Baghdad and skirted the precarious artery of the Suez Canal — two names that, in recent days, have once again featured heavily in global news bulletins. As dawn broke, I peered down at oil fields and flares burning defiantly against the coming heat, flames licking at the pale sky as if to underline the point.

And then — unmistakably — Dubai itself. The city rises almost obscenely from the desert. Outlying villas and settlements sit marooned in seas of sand, encompassed by dunes that quietly remind you who truly rules this landscape. For now, oil tames it. But it still feels conjured rather than grown — summoned by capital and climate control.

If I had to describe Dubai in a few poetic words, I might say something like “a mirage of permanence”. A place where even the coastline is engineered, where the palm-shaped archipelago of Palm Jumeirah is pressed into existence at immense environmental cost. From space, it forms a striking geometric flourish. On the ground, the artifice is harder to ignore.

City of paradox

Dubai must be one of the sunniest cities on Earth. It has enough sunshine hours to power its economy many times over. And yet, flying in, I saw remarkably few solar panels. Why harness the free energy raining from the sky when oil still flows so readily beneath the sand?

Everything here depends on energy abundance — desalinated water, chilled interiors, illuminated towers, indoor ski slopes. Oil facilitates life at scale in a landscape most species wisely abandoned long ago. But that reliance lends the city an unsettling fragility. It feels as though, should the flow falter, the desert would patiently reclaim its territory.

That fragility now feels sharper after the geopolitical events (to out it politely) of recent days.

The Middle East is once again in turmoil. Conflict ripples outward from long-contested fault lines. Airspace closures, missile exchanges, diplomatic brinkmanship — each development carries implications for a city and region where prosperity depends on seamless global connectivity.

Dubai’s success is inseparable from its role as a transport hub. Emirates has built a global network that stitches Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia together through a single desert crossroads. Freight, finance, tourism and conferences all converge here. When regional tensions rise, flight paths bend, insurance premiums spike, and the choreography of global movement becomes more complicated.

So far, Dubai remains outwardly calm — insulated by wealth, diplomacy and careful positioning. The malls are full, the hotels busy, the cranes still turning. But the very geography that made it strategically valuable also places it within reach of instability. Its gleaming airport terminals are both gateway and vulnerability.

Inside the mirage

From street level, the high-rises form a relentless backdrop. Development continues at breakneck speed in every direction. For now it dazzles — attracting holidaymakers, entrepreneurs, influencers and conference-goers. Yet scratch the surface and Dubai can feel like a glossy façade stretched over one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.

Step outside too long and the heat drains you. Even the sea feels languid, as if exhausted by the thermal burden it absorbs each summer. The beaches are artificially  immaculate, the interiors plush, the service seamless — but always mediated by machinery humming out of sight.

In that sense, Dubai is less a city than a controlled environment.

And perhaps that is why the current geopolitical tremors feel symbolically resonant. A metropolis built on the assumption of perpetual growth, stable trade routes and uninterrupted energy flows suddenly exists in a region where none of those can ever be fully guaranteed. A hub in turmoil

The contradictions of Dubai’s engineered calm feel especially stark against the backdrop of the current geopolitical shockwaves. In the past week, airspace over the United Arab Emirates has been temporarily shut down, and flights to and from Dubai International Airport — one of the busiest aviation hubs in the world — have been repeatedly suspended as regional military tensions escalate.

The result has been chaotic for thousands of travellers: tourists, business visitors and long-term residents, who used Dubai as a tax-free home, are now stuck in the city with no clear way out. Transit passengers whose flight plans relied on smooth connections through the Gulf are stranded in terminals or hotels while airlines and air authorities scramble to adjust schedules.

Governments from Europe to Australia are urging their nationals to register with embassies and “shelter in place”, while some are planning mass repatriation operations — not for tourists alone, but for expatriates and workers who had chosen to make this glittering hub their base.

In some cases, officials have even resorted to military flights to bring home ministers and citizens caught up in the disruption, a stark reminder that Dubai’s global connectivity can become a vulnerability when that connectivity falters

Questions beneath the glitter

Development continues apace. More towers, more malls, more artificial islands. For now, Dubai thrives precisely because it is so curated — a place where appearances matter more than origins, where the environment is conditioned, cooled and conquered.

But beneath it all lies a deeper contradiction. We know the planet is heating. We know deserts are expanding. We know fossil fuels both enable and imperil modern civilisation. And yet here, in one of the most extreme climates on Earth, humanity builds ever higher as if the future were simply a longer version of the present.

Recent events in the Middle East are a reminder that energy, geography and politics are inseparable. Oil does not merely power air-conditioning; it shapes alliances, conflicts and vulnerabilities. Dubai is both beneficiary and symbol of that system — its skyline a physical manifestation of hydrocarbon modernity.

Last October, from my hotel balcony at dusk, the city shimmered under a haze of heat and humidity. At dusk the lights came on, one tower after another, defying darkness and desert alike.

Whether Dubai represents our boldest ingenuity or our most extravagant denial may ultimately depend on forces far beyond its immaculate highways — on geopolitics, on energy transitions and on climate trajectories.

And, perhaps most immediately, on how long the air-conditioning keeps humming.

When the Water Wins

 

Upper River Welland in flood (Feb 2026).                        Photo: Ian Bateman

There is a particular kind of dread that comes not from sudden catastrophe, but from slow acceptance: the point at which something once shocking becomes familiar, then normal, then mere background noise.

In recent weeks, flood warnings have scrolled across our phones, met with only fleeting attention. Roads close. Trains stop. Fields disappear beneath shallow seas. Insurers quietly retreat from whole postcodes. Phrases like “managed retreat” and “once-in-a-century event” lose their meaning through overuse.

Last week, that background noise briefly came into focus with the story of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, South Wales.

The local authority in Rhondda Cynon Taf agreed to spend up to £2.6 million to buy up and demolish 16 homes on a residential terrace that has repeatedly flooded – including during Storm Dennis in 2020, when water inside homes reached almost two metres deep.

The homes, on a floodplain beside the Nant Clydach, were deemed so dangerous that there is no economically viable way to protect them. Natural defences are no longer viable; the risk to life is judged “high”.

Journalists covering the story described this as the first time in the UK that a whole street has been bought out and will be demolished because of climate-linked flood risk: a de facto announcement of the country’s first climate evacuees – though the word itself remains carefully unspoken.

The most frightening thing about climate collapse is not the spectacle of it, but how quickly we absorb it into everyday life.

That sense of quiet inevitability – the feeling that something fundamental has shifted beneath our feet – is what led me to write Flood Waters Down.

I live on the edge of the South Lincolnshire Fens, a landscape that exists only because we forced it into submission. Drained, straightened, regulated, pumped. A triumph of engineering and agricultural efficiency – and a reminder of a very old human habit: believing control to be the same as permanence.

The Fens are flat, exposed and deceptively fragile. They sit mostly at or below sea level, held in place by embankments, lock gates and sluices – and by faith in powerful pump engines that must work perfectly, all the time. As the atmosphere warms and the seas rise, that bargain begins to look increasingly brittle.

Historically, when the water returns to the Fens, it does not do so politely. It spreads. It lingers. It reshapes the land and the people who live on it.

The phrase – the water always wins – became a quiet mantra while I was writing Flood Waters Down. Not as a slogan, but as an observation. Nature does not need to be dramatic to be unstoppable. It only needs time.

So why turn to fiction this time, rather than reportage?

I’ve spent much of my career reporting on complex systems – space, technology, the environment. Good, honest journalism is vital. It tells us what is happening, who is responsible and why it matters.

But it has limits. In the context of climate change it struggles to capture what collapse feels like from the inside. How it alters relationships, priorities, morality. How people adapt not in heroic arcs, but in compromises and retreats. How systems designed to protect us quietly begin to outlive us.

Fiction offers the possibility of stepping beyond the headline and into the atmosphere. To explore not just submerged landscapes, but flooded institutions. Not just environmental breakdown, but the psychological weather of a society learning, slowly, that it may not recover.

Flood Waters Down is not set in some far-off, abstract tomorrow. It occupies the narrow band of time where today’s assumptions still mostly hold – but are beginning to fail.

Its lineage owes more to J.G. Ballard than to blockbuster dystopia: environments that shape behaviour, infrastructures that become characters in their own right, and futures that feel uncomfortably adjacent to the present.

The flooded Fens become a fragmented, part-rewilded zone of survivors and renegades. Elsewhere, enclaves of wealth retreat behind technology and automation, convinced they can outlast the chaos. Over it all hangs the presence of increasingly autonomous systems, designed to manage crisis, but quietly redefining what “order” means.

None of this requires a leap of imagination. We are already living with early versions of these dynamics: climate adaptation by postcode, algorithmic governance, uneven resilience, the quiet return of sovereign rule, the outsourcing of responsibility to systems no one fully controls.

Nothing transforms the world overnight – the future arrives with more of a shrug than a bang. But fiction can change how we pay attention.

Climate fiction, at its best, is not about predicting the future. It is about rehearsing emotional and ethical responses to the futures we are already drifting towards. It asks uncomfortable questions: Who adapts? Who retreats? Who decides? What do we cling to when the structures we trusted begin to dissolve?

As Flood Waters Down moves towards publication, I find myself less interested in whether readers find it frightening than whether they find it recognisable. That quiet click of understanding. That sense of yes, this feels plausible.

Because once a future becomes imaginable, it becomes discussable. And once it is discussable, it becomes harder to ignore. The water, after all, does not need our belief. It only needs our inaction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flood Waters Down is released in paperback by Cliftop Publishing on 9 April 2026 and will soon be available for pre-order.