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| Dubai beach scene. Photo: C Simpson |
Dubai is an extraordinary metropolis in one of the planet’s most hostile environments. But as conflict disrupts the Gulf and Earth’s climate continues to warm, Clive Simpson asks whether this desert city offers a glimpse of humanity’s future – or a warning about its fragility.
The most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is built upon some enormous suppositions. That energy will remain abundant. That trade routes will remain open. That aircraft will continue arriving in their thousands. That desalination plants will keep producing water and that the elaborate machinery required to sustain millions of people in a fiercely inhospitable environment will continue humming uninterrupted.
Above all, perhaps, that technology and money can keep nature at bay.
When I visited Dubai for the first time last autumn, those assumptions were difficult to ignore. Here was an exceptional conurbation of concrete and tarmac rising from the desert, apparently insulated from the environmental and geopolitical realities surrounding it.
Less than a year later, some are being put to the test. Conflict across the Middle East has placed extraordinary pressure on the arteries connecting the Gulf to the wider world, exposing vulnerabilities that are easily overlooked when everything is working.
Dubai is an astonishing demonstration of what humanity can build when money, energy and technology come together. It is also a manifestation of just how dependent modern civilisation has become upon all three.
The refrigerated city
By day three in Dubai, I had developed the air-con cough. Not a virus, just the inevitable consequence of living inside a 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.
The UAE’s centrepiece city exists almost in defiance of its natural environment. Temperatures routinely climb into the high 40s during summer as the accelerating effects of climate change promise still greater extremes across the whole Gulf. Yet construction continues on an astounding scale. Towers rise as fast as cranes can swing them into place. Whole districts appear to materialise overnight.
Flying towards Dubai, the contradictions begin long before landing. On my Emirates flight we passed over Iraq near Baghdad and skirted the precarious artery of the Suez Canal. As dawn broke, I looked down at oil fields and gas flares burning against the pale sky.
Then came Dubai, the city rising obscenely from the desert like the world of some futuristic sci-fi movie. Outlying villas and settlements sit marooned in seas of sand, the wind-smoothed dunes quietly reminding you who owns this landscape.
Dubai and its environs appear to exist in a mirage of permanence, conjured into being by wealth, engineering and climate control. Even the coastline has been instructed to conform. The iconic Palm Jumeirah – an immense geometric flourish best appreciated from the air or space – was reclaimed from the Gulf, imposing its own geometry on what had once been open water.
Conquering geography
Almost everything required to sustain human life in the city depends upon abundant energy: desalinated water, air conditioning, illuminated towers, transport networks, hotels, shopping malls and the constant movement of millions of people through one of the world's great aviation hubs.
The result can be intoxicating. The beaches are immaculate. Hotels are luxurious. Roads are wide and manicured. Shopping malls become destinations in themselves. There is even, famously, an indoor ski slope. Outside, meanwhile, lies the desert.
The impression is of a gigantic, controlled environment, a city whose inhabitants experience the natural world largely after it has been filtered, cooled, irrigated or otherwise improved at the behest of man.
But that is also what makes Dubai interesting beyond the obvious questions about wealth and excess. Perhaps it isn't an aberration at all. Perhaps it is simply an exaggerated version of the bargain much of modern civilisation has made.
We use technology and enormous quantities of energy to insulate ourselves from environmental boundaries while our collective consumption makes those same limits increasingly difficult to ignore. Dubai merely makes the arrangement spectacularly visible.
When the arteries constrict
Recent events have demonstrated just how quickly those assumptions can be tested. The Strait of Hormuz is not some distant geopolitical abstraction to Dubai. Look at a map. The narrow waterway sits immediately beyond the UAE's coastline, separating the Gulf from the Arabian Sea and the wider world.
For decades it has been one of the principal arteries of the global energy system. Now that artery has constricted.
Shipping movements have fallen sharply during the conflict and energy markets have been disrupted. On 17 September just four commodity vessels transited the strait, compared with a ten-day average of 16.
At the opposite end of the Arabian Peninsula, the advance of Houthi forces along Yemen's Red Sea coast has simultaneously increased concern about shipping through Bab el-Mandeb.
The remarkable thing is not that the system has failed but how quickly geopolitical events can expose the complex infrastructure upon which normality depends.
Dubai's prosperity rests not merely upon oil or gas, but upon connectivity. Its airport links Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Its hotels depend upon tourists arriving. Its businesses depend upon international capital and labour. Its supermarkets depend upon supply chains stretching far beyond the desert.
The city is therefore simultaneously an extraordinary demonstration of globalisation and an unusually concentrated expression of its vulnerabilities.
When the system works, it appears effortless. When it stutters, we suddenly see the machinery on which that effortlessness depends.
A city from the future?
There is a temptation to regard Dubai as something exotic – an extravagant desert playground made possible by Gulf wealth and tax-free living. That lets the rest of us off rather too easily.
Look instead at increasingly hot cities across southern Europe. Look at the growing demand for air conditioning as temperatures rise. Look at water shortages, desalination projects, artificial environments and the energy required to make densely populated places tolerable during extreme heat.
Dubai may be unusual but only because it arrived early. Climate change means more of humanity will increasingly depend upon our ability to make environments habitable.
The question is not whether technology can do this. Dubai proves that it can. The more difficult question is how resilient such systems remain when climate, energy and geopolitics begin applying pressure simultaneously.
Last autumn I stood on my hotel balcony at dusk watching the city emerge from the day’s murky heat. One by one the lights came on across the skyline. Glass towers glittered against the darkening sky and traffic flowed along immaculate highways below. It was undeniably impressive. But was also acutely aware that beyond the illuminated city lay the creeping sand, waiting patiently in the darkness of the desert.
Dubai may be an extreme case, but the bargain it represents is increasingly our own: ever more sophisticated technology and ever greater expenditure of energy to keep environmental limits at arm's length.
Whether that makes it a monument to human ingenuity or a warning about our belief in permanent abundance remains an open question. For now, the towers continue to rise, the lights come on and the desert is kept at bay. And, perhaps most immediately, the air-conditioning keeps purring.
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Editor’s note: this article was updated on 21 September 2026.
