Sitting astride a motorbike near a Dubai kitchen, sweat forms on Mohamad’s brow as he waits to collect a lunch order. The food is not for him; he’ll drive it through the sweltering financial and tourist hub to a customer in an air-conditioned tower block.
With the mercury nudging 44C and high humidity, “it feels like a sauna”, the delivery driver says. Originally from Pakistan, Mohamad is uncomfortably dressed for the weather, wearing protective pads, dark trousers and the branded long-sleeved, high-neck top supplied by the delivery platform he works with.
From July to early September, Dubai’s streets are so hot and sticky that the “heat index”, a combination of air temperature and moisture levels, regularly exceeds 50C.
Last month, temperatures in the forties and humidity levels of 80 per cent or more resulted in a “feels like” temperature of 62C by midday at Dubai International Airport, US National Weather Service records show.
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The Gulf is one of many regions learning how to live with extreme heat. Indian authorities have reported more than 40,000 cases of suspected heatstroke during a prolonged heatwave, and at least 110 deaths.
In Saudi Arabia this year, 1,301 pilgrims died after walking in temperatures that rose to nearly 50C during the hajj.
But individual experiences of the searing heat vary according to wealth. While Mohamad and thousands of other mainly foreign workers swelter in the open, the Gulf’s vast hydrocarbon wealth has allowed its better-off residents to luxuriate in western-style cities that defy the inhospitable desert.
Many of Dubai’s upwardly mobile still jet off to cooler climes during the peak of the heat, but those who remain can avail themselves of facilities that keep them indoors during the hottest parts of the day.
Dubai has ice rinks and an indoor ski slope, while emperor penguins and Arctic foxes live in Abu Dhabi’s SeaWorld, a vast indoor theme park. In the region’s shopping malls, the air is so chilly that one Dubai expat carries a jumper with her while shopping during summer, and says she looks forward to winter so she “can be warm again”.
Those determined to brave the blazing summer sun can swim in outdoor pools filled with chilled water or jog around the 1.14km air-conditioned outdoor path in Qatar’s Umm Al Seneem park.
But the differing experiences of the well-off and the labourers, security guards and parking attendants that keep the Gulf functioning show how extreme climate risks entrenching and exacerbating inequality.
As the world warms, the region may serve as a lesson on how — or how not — to deal with scorching temperatures in urban environments which are home to tens of millions of people.
“Right now what you’re seeing in the Gulf countries is what you’re going to see in many parts of southern Europe, or the southern US, or in parts of India and Bangladesh,” says Barrak Alahmad, a research fellow at Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health.
“This is the opportunity for the Gulf countries to actually lead the field [in heat safety]. And I think it’s a missed opportunity.”
The region in which the modern United Arab Emirates sits has been called “the land of the empty bucket”, because of the rapid evaporation of water.
“By and large, the region lacks the three fundamentals of human settlements” of water supply, an agricultural hinterland and a moderate climate, says Karim Elgendy, an associate fellow at London-based Chatham House who specialises in urban sustainability in the region. For centuries, the absence of such basics put a cap on the region’s growth.
Petrodollars changed all that, allowing many Gulf states to buy expensive technology like desalination units and air conditioners and to import more food. “Those financial resources have enabled [Gulf societies] to live despite their climate, not in harmony with [it],” says Elgendy.
Having overcome nature, and with the hydrocarbon industry booming, the population of the Gulf Cooperation Council states exploded from under 4mn people in 1950 to nearly 30mn by 2000, according to UN estimates. It then almost doubled again to reach 58mn by 2019.
Cities in the Gulf expanded on the back of fossil fuel exports. But the emissions from burning those fuels have contributed to the climate change that has made the region’s summer heat ever more intense.
“The Gulf region is already uninhabitable in summer without cooling systems,” says Diana Francis, assistant professor of earth sciences at Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa University.
But since the region is already equipped to survive under such conditions, “the impact of rising temperatures on the population will be felt less than in other regions where no cooling systems exist”, she says.
A lack of historical data means little is known about how the climate has evolved in the Gulf compared with other regions. But older Emiratis recall a very different environment six or seven decades ago.
Growing up in Dubai in the 1950s, political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla remembers summers being less hot and shorter. Houses were open, to channel fresh air, some had ventilation towers, and families would sleep on flat roofs.
“One fan for the whole family was enough then,” recalls Abdulla. Today, almost every room in a middle-class Dubai home has air conditioning.
“It appears that over the last 40 years, summer temperatures in the UAE have increased by about 1C,” says Francesco Paparella, an assistant professor at NYU Abu Dhabi and principal investigator at the Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental Science. That compares with an average global temperature rise of at least 1.1C since the industrial age began around the 1850s.
Rising humidity adds to that. For every 1C increase in temperature, a given volume of air can hold 7 per cent more water vapour. This year, conditions were exacerbated by record sea temperatures in the Gulf, contributing to high humidity levels that affect humans’ ability to cool themselves by sweating.
Scientists say the wet bulb temperature, a measure of heat stress, is critical. Most studies suggest that beyond 35C, reached after six hours of exposure to temperatures of more than 40C and a humidity level of 75 per cent, humans can no longer cool themselves down.
Researchers such as Paparella stress that a lack of data makes it hard to forecast what the Gulf’s climate will be in future, although some scientific studies suggest intense rainfall and storms will increase.
In a “business-as-usual” scenario where the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change are not drastically reduced, researchers estimate that after 50 years, “unprecedented super- and ultra-extreme heatwave conditions will emerge” in the Middle East and north Africa region, he says, with temperatures potentially exceeding 56C.
Even the glittering skyscrapers built by ambitious Gulf leaders are not well adapted to such a worsening climate.
The glass and steel downtowns — what Elgendy calls “spaceships in the desert” — required large supplies of desalinated water and constant cooling. “When you fully glaze a building, all that heat gets trapped inside and then you need to air-condition it out,” says Elgendy. “It’s a really poor choice.”
But the region’s cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy meant there was little incentive to find alternative solutions. Cooling accounts for up to 70 per cent of electricity consumption during peak hours in the Gulf states, putting a huge strain on electricity grids.
The UAE has introduced green building codes “because of the realisation that the kind of buildings we have in the desert cannot be the same as those you find in New York”, says Leonard Chirenje, assistant professor of sustainability sciences at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed University.
To make air conditioning more efficient, some Gulf countries are also using district cooling, which circulates cold water from a central facility through insulated pipes into buildings rather than relying on individual air conditioning units.
Tabreed, the listed Dubai district cooling company, says it supplies services across the region to buildings ranging from the office complexes of Saudi Aramco, the oil and gas giant, to commercial towers on Bahrain’s waterfront. District cooling is also planned for Saudi Arabia’s futuristic Line city, under-construction in Neom.
Some developments have experimented with reviving traditional building techniques. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence uses clay facades for shade, which have a noticeable cooling effect, on the campus named after the Abu Dhabi ruler.
But most of the Gulf’s ways of coping with climatic extremes still involve enormous amounts of greenhouse gas-producing energy, notes Paparella. Cheap fossil fuels mean that renewable energy sources are caught “between a rock and a hard place”.
Construction activity is relentless in the Gulf, as the region builds to accommodate expected further increases in population. Saudi Arabia, the biggest economy in the GCC, is building whole new conurbations such as Neom and New Murabba, a new downtown in Riyadh.
But research suggests that construction workers, often itinerant labourers from south Asia, are among the most vulnerable to the extreme weather conditions.
Data is scarce but in Kuwait, Harvard epidemiologist Alahmad and his colleagues found that non-Kuwaiti men were up to three times more likely to die during extreme heat conditions compared with normal weather, despite the workers generally being young and fit.
Although climate is not the only culprit for this vulnerability among migrant workers — they can suffer everything from cramped accommodation to problems getting healthcare — heat is aggravating these issues, Alahmad says.
Researchers, led by Bandana Pradhan from the Institute of Medicine at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University, concluded that high incidences of fatalities from heart disease among Nepali migrant workers in Qatar during the hot season were “most likely due to severe heat stress”.
Of the 571 Nepalis who died from cardiovascular disease from 2009 to 2017, some 200 could have been saved through “effective heat protection”, their analysis concluded.
Qatar and other GCC countries have taken steps to reduce the risks of outdoor work during the summer. All of them now ban outdoor work during the middle of the day, though the hours and dates vary.
Some city authorities go further — the municipality of Dubai, for example, says companies should provide workers with cold water and electrolytes. “It’s a productivity issue,” says one construction company boss, who agrees with the 12.30 to 3pm restriction in the city. “At 50 degrees what is he [the worker] going to do for you?”
However, the International Labour Organization says that temperatures can still be “extremely high outside of the banned hours, and limited inspections undermine the policy’s effectiveness”.
The middle-of-the-day ban is also inflexible and does not take into account other factors that can affect human health, says Alahmad, such as humidity and the task the person is performing.
Ironically some of the lowest-paid migrant workers in the Gulf, who bear the brunt of its brutal summers, have left their home countries because of climate change.
Low-lying Bangladesh, the country of origin for millions of construction workers in the Gulf, has been severely hit by changing weather patterns and rising sea levels.
Bournemouth University researcher Nirmal Aryal says similar factors are at play in his home country of Nepal, where increasingly unpredictable weather patterns have disrupted the subsidence farming upon which many Nepalis depend.
Aryal has been investigating the instance of kidney disease affecting returning migrant workers, although he says there is not yet enough data to definitively blame hot working conditions. The need for evidence, and collaboration with Gulf countries, to study the effect of heat stress on workers is urgent, he says.
“Nepal is a poor country [and] migrant workers are the poorest of the poor,” Aryal says. When workers return home with nephrological diseases, the cost of kidney dialysis has “a significant social and economic impact”.
In Dubai’s touristy JBR area, a parking assistant hides in the shade of an umbrella. Also called Mohammad, he hails from Kerala in southern India, and came to the UAE nine months ago after his bachelors degree in commerce failed to land him a job.
He rates his situation “five out of ten — it’s too hot”, but is optimistic his lot will improve with Dubai’s balmy winters. The 27-year-old is one of 3.5mn UAE-based Indians, whose home country is no stranger to blistering heat.
Before the monsoon rains break India’s summer heat, pedestrians in the coastal commercial centre of Mumbai quickly become drenched in sweat thanks to high humidity and headache-inducing temperatures.
Although families in India’s rapidly growing middle class are installing air conditioning units, poorer Indians often remain dependent on fans — both at home and in the Gulf.
Zeyed University’s Chirenje, who is originally from Zimbabwe, says climate change and new cooling technologies have opened a Pandora’s box of sociopolitical issues. “Is access to that technology the same for everyone?” he asks. “No, it’s not.”
He describes the conditions of an African woman he knows, who works as a maid in the UAE. She sleeps in a small room whose air conditioning is connected to the family dining room — but her boss switches that unit off at night, leaving her to sweat and suffer bad sleep.
Those who “have the capacity to adapt — the rich — will continue enjoying,” says Chirenje. “The richer continue becoming richer and the poor will continue becoming poorer, because they cannot adapt.”
Mohamad, the delivery rider, knows this only too well. He says the authorities in Dubai have opened rest stops for delivery drivers, but they are far away from the eateries he serves. “We work less in summer because we get too tired and it’s bad for the body,” he adds.
“I have been sick, with fever and body pain . . . heat is very dangerous.”
Chloe Cornish is the FT’s Gulf business correspondent. She has previously worked in Mumbai and Beirut
Data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari
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