‘IA Swede trains their crows to pick them up,” a passer-by shouted helplessly as my colleague and I filled our jam bottles with hundreds of cigarette butts. Half an hour later it’s plastic bottles, cans and boxer shorts.
Our team of a dozen volunteers snorkel and scuba dive their way around the Dubai coastline of the Gulf – specifically a stretch of La Mer Bay adopted by Chloe Griffin, a diving instructor who organizes these “junk dives” for students.
However, the biggest environmental concern in these waters is not litter. This is the damage being done to coral and other marine wildlife by rapidly rising sea temperatures.
“I’ve noticed significant shifts in the four years I’ve been here – especially the seasonal impact on coral reefs,” says Griffin. “During the scorching summers the coral often struggles – and yet it regenerates miraculously during the cooler winter months.”
Or it did. Half the world’s coral has been lost in the last half century to pollution, overfishing and coastal development, and the crisis threatens what is left.
And while Gulf corals are no slouch – the toughest, most thermally tolerant in the world – with the Gulf now warming at twice the rate of global oceans, reaching 38C (100.4F) during the summer, even these corals are pushed to their limits. Up to 70% of corals off the coast of the United Arab Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, have been bleached in the past six years.
Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, 124 miles (200 km) north in Iran, dredging, construction and bleaching events have caused “lethal stress” to corals – and there is even less capacity to protect, monitor and restore them.
“We are not like Qatar or UAE, with money from oil companies,” says Mohammad Reza Shokri, a marine biologist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, explaining that he receives just $1,200 (£950) a year in research funding which must also cover the work done by his three students. Sanctions imposed on Iran mean little or no access to overseas financing.
One thing that can help both researchers is cooperation between countries. However, it is particularly difficult in the Gulf, where eight nations share the coastline: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Shokri is one of a group of leading marine biologists and scientists from across the region who have published a paper urging governments to allow them to work more closely together through “science diplomacy”. The aim would be to halt further decline in the Gulf’s marine ecosystems, including its coral reefs, through “peace parks” – protected areas spanning neighboring countries.
The parks will be a version of the land-based conservation areas in Africa, where conservation zones cross national borders, even between countries that may be fighting each other.
In the Gulf – as much as anywhere in the world – political sensitivities and rivalries can cloud issues and blunt action. Advising politicians and rulers on how to balance economic development with environmental stewardship can be difficult for scientists.
In the UAE, laws and regulations limiting criticism of the government, for example, mean that scientists here choose their words carefully about the climate crisis, or the environmental damage caused by relentless construction. Just a short drive from the air-conditioned Expo City venue is the artificial island of Palm Jebel Ali, where construction reportedly destroyed some of the best coral reefs in the area.
Even though Dubai – the UAE’s largest city – is hosting the Cop28 climate summit, which began on November 30, discussion of climate or other controversial issues will be problematic. In October the British government expressed disappointment that the UAE did not accept recommendations to guarantee rights to freedom of expression at Cop28.
Before the summit, Shokri and his fellow scientists around the Gulf called for regional action that sets aside sensitivities for the sake of the ocean’s bleached corals and the endangered marine life they support.
In a newspaper published at the end of September by the Royal Society, they called for greater freedoms to work together and share data and expertise, in order to create large, protected areas in the Gulf that span neighboring countries. They also called for stronger intergovernmental organizations to force change.
Science diplomacy initiatives in the Middle East date back 30 years and more, from the Malta Conferences to the Cern-supported Sesame particle accelerator. Indeed, a regional organization for the protection of the Gulf’s marine environment already exists: the Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment (ROPME)established in Kuwait in 1978 under the auspices of the UN.
But Shokri and his co-authors say ROPME is “challenged by poor compliance,” claiming it is ineffective in providing leadership or coordinating region-wide funding and data sharing.
“ROPME was a good initiative to begin with, but its work now seems to be nothing more than hosting workshops,” said Fahad al-Senafi, a marine physicist at Kuwait University, who conducted research on climate variability and the shamal – a warm, dusty wind from the north blowing over Iraq and the Gulf states.
“Scientists here tend to work with each other, regardless of political tension. Even when there were political tensions with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, we still found a way to work together.
“Sometimes there will be disagreements about whether we should write Persian or Arabian Gulf in the final paper, but there are no restrictions for us to talk together.
“The biggest challenge is the sharing of data. All the Gulf states are developing their coastlines and employing consultants to carry out environmental impact assessments, but none of that vast amount of data is being shared with scientists.”
In his efforts to convince the Kuwaiti national assembly to enact open access laws that would compel the government and consultants to share environmental data, Senafi hopes to provide a template for colleagues in other Gulf countries.
“We all have the same issues about fisheries, coral and changing water characteristics. We all add stress through desalination plants and infrastructure. But we need everyone to share data.”
Senafi, Shokri and their colleagues can take encouragement from a coral-focused collaborative venture in another sea at the mercy of geopolitics. Founded by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2019, the Transnational Red Sea Center (TRSC) excludes researchers from Switzerland, Jordan, Israel, Djibouti and Sudan to monitor and share data on the coral reef along the Gulf of Aqaba, at the northern end of the Red Sea. There were talks with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to get them on board as well.
“We facilitate cooperation by providing the diplomatic umbrella of Switzerland,” says Guilhem Banc-Prandi, TRSC scientific coordinator. “Most scientists want to work together, but in some countries, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Djibouti, our ambassadors and diplomats have to go to the highest government level to get the green light for scientists to be involved.”
Banc-Prandi has just returned from an expedition to Djibouti, to map and study remote reefs in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb, where the Red Sea flows into the Indian Ocean. Scientists from Sudan and Djibouti joined him. But the Israel-Hamas war prompted the TRSC to decide on security grounds not to invite Israeli scientists to join the research vessel on this mission.
One Israeli scientist, Maoz Fine of the Israel Interuniversity Institute of Marine Science in Eilat, whose research has helped scientists understand how evolutionary selection has equipped corals in the Gulf of Aqaba to withstand high temperatures and salinity, says he understands the problems.
“The TRSC is great – for the management of the Red Sea it is critical – but scientists are afraid to cooperate with each other, certainly with the Israelis. Only a brave few will dare,” says Fine.
“At the moment, each country manages its own reefs and ignores the others when it is clear that every action taken in one country affects all others. Rivalry and pollution do not recognize political boundaries.
“That’s why a neutral umbrella – in our case, Switzerland – is needed to enable us to work with colleagues, who are also now friends. Because in this region it is a difficult neighborhood.”
