Unintended Consequences // The Artificial Islands of Dubai
We often think that our small day to day habits and actions have no direct impacts on the environment. When compounded however, as this image above which caught my attention shows, our scale of impacts increases, our unintended consequences may magnify and prove to be far more unpredictable, as seen in the case of Dubai’s many artificial shoreline and island projects.
Every island outside the original flat landscape has been artificially created. Is this development of luxury marinas,
this craving for shoreside homes developing too quickly for us to realise its future impacts?
Caught up in the whirlwind of development, it would seem that while “the resources of our global ecosystem are enormous [we forget that] they are also limited, and we often don’t know enough to accurately predict how they will respond to change.” (Williams, 2011). Indeed for artificial lakes, such changes induce problems such as unwanted insects (mosquitos) to thrive, and are one of “the unintended consequences of establishing perennial water bodies” (Roach et al., 2008). Some marine analysis for example has indicated that due to the tight organisation, water replenishment of the inner marinas extend to be as long as 42 days, indicating that water was being poorly flushed and possibly stagnating. (Van Lavieren et al., 2011). Indeed with 40% of the Emirate’s shores being artificially developed, change is now happening too quickly for us to carefully analyse the environmental impacts (Nature), potentially with devastating ecological consequences.
As the increasingly clear shades (yellow/orange) indicate, the amount of water becoming stagnant is a source of
potential worry and may in fact cause more harm to marine life and introduce unwanted insects and plats. (Van Lavieren et al., 2011).
More evidence to suggest a fundamental rethink of reclaiming our shores is that habitat loss which has been in “continuous decline over the past 50 years” and that 35% of the Gulf region has now suffered from marine diversity loss, attributed in part to altered temperatures, water flows and salinity (Butler, 2005). In particular, it has in fact been pointed out that 70% of coral reefs in the region has now been lost and the remaining reefs under threat of degradation (Cressey, 2011). Despite the company’s commitment to innovation for seaside development therefore, I feel that a reassessment and indeed increased monitoring of ecological sustainability is necessary to make these projects more appropriate and less damaging.
The developers, Nakheel has however offered a rebuttal, arguing that “richness of flora and fauna [are] taking advantage of the habitat offered by our projects [and this] does indeed exceed the diversity previously found on the site.” (Butler, 2005). Simultaneously however, we must note that this has (at least in part) been done for encouraging resident diving activities, meaning that these ‘restored’ reefs will never truly be free of human interaction. Other proposed activities such as the scuba diving park, complete with “a 1 kilogram gold bar will be hidden daily as a ‘treasure’ to be found” and the introduction of dolphins from the Solomon Islands (Picow, 2009), remains questionable in terms of the corporation’s desire (if this desire exists) to recreate untouched reef and marine reserves.
What Dubai may need to realise is that “Although each of these systems is interdependent of the other, the whole responds to every stimulus” (Williams, 2011). While they eagerly cultivate new species and new shorelines both for financial and supposed ecological gain, others are less optimistic, noting that “the ecological trajectories are downhill” and that “major change” is necessary both in data collection and in how habitat preservation and revitalisation is approached (Cressey, 2011). For me, as the tide of exclusive shoreline homes becomes increasingly fashionable, despite our rising sea levels, I can only hope for greater care and balance between development and sustainability, remembering in the words of Harry Potter that sometimes “progress, for progress’s sake, must be discouraged.”
References
Creative Advertising Archive. “Deforestation Awareness: ‘Fallen Tree’ Print Advertisement by Jung Von Matt.” (December 2007). Retrieved 20 April 2014 from: http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/deforestation-awareness-fallen-tree-10913705/resizes/1600/
Tina Butler. “Dubai’s Artifical Islands Have High Environmental Cost – The Price of ‘The World’: Dubai’s Artificial Future.” Mongabay.com. (23 August 2005). Retrieved 22 April 2014 from: http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0823-tina_butler_dubai.html
Daniel Cressey. “Gulf Ecology Hit by Coastal Development.” Nature (16 November 2011). Retrieved 22 April 2014 from: http://www.nature.com/news/gulf-ecology-hit-by-coastal-development-1.9374
Hanneka Van Lavieren, John Burt, David A. Feary, et al. (2011). Policy Report: Managing the Growing Impacts of Development on Fragile Coastal and Marine Ecosystems: Lessons from the Gulf. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). Hamilton, Canada.
Maurice Picow. “Dubai’s Artificial World Islands Are Killing Corals and Pushing Nature Out of the Sea.” Green Prophet. (10 June 2009). Retrieved on 22 April 2014 from: http://www.greenprophet.com/2009/06/world-islands-dubai/
W. John Roach, James B. Heffernan, Nancy B. Grimm et al., Unintended Consequences of Urbanisation for Acquatic Ecosystems: A Case Study from the Arizona Desert. BioScience 58, no. 8 (September 2008): 715-727.
Mark Williams. “Ecosystems: The Law of Unintended Consequences.” Examiner.com. (2 December 2011). Retrieved on 22 April 2014 from: http://www.examiner.com/article/ecosystems-the-law-of-unintended-consequences