The temperature in Al Ain, the fourth largest city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is over 40°C. But, on this sweltering September day, the skies suddenly darken and rain splatters onto the concrete streets, providing a welcome moment of respite from the oppressive heat.

What the residents of Al Ain may not realise, as they lean out of their car windows to take in the rain, is that the water droplets falling from the sky have been given a helping hand. On the edge of the city, the National Center of Meteorology (NCM) has just deployed one of its aircraft to fire a salt-based solution into a passing cloud, forcing it to disgorge its precious cargo of moisture.

This ‘cloud seeding’ technology can’t work miracles, and the NCM can’t conjure clouds out of thin air. But when its monitors spot an opportunity, it can send an aircraft to intercept a promising cloud before it dissipates or drifts out to sea, increasing the amount of rain that would naturally fall.

The UAE is “leading the way” in perfecting cloud seeding, says Omar Al Yazeedi, the NCM’s deputy director-general. Countries around the world send delegations to visit the NCM “almost weekly”, he tells us, adding that the UAE is providing scientists with access to technology, and helping its partners conduct feasibility studies into the potential of cloud seeding in their own environments.

This is one way that the UAE is attempting to find innovative solutions to adapt to climate change. “It will help a lot,” says Mr Al Yazeedi. He points out that water scarcity is a growing problem worldwide — and this is an area where the UAE could teach the world a thing or two.

Going green in the desert?

As the UAE prepares to welcome global policy-makers for COP28, which begins on November 30, the Gulf state is seeking to position itself as a world leader in sustainability. 

The country is courting green industries with its ‘Make it in the Emirates’ campaign, both to serve the local market and to export globally. Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate by area, aims to “decarbonise the economy and become a green energy powerhouse”, says Jamie Levy, senior advisor at the Abu Dhabi Investment Office.

Mr Levy says the emirate has a competitive advantage it has fully exploited when it comes to offering companies access to plentiful and relatively low-cost energy. This is a vital prerequisite for companies in highly energy-intensive sectors. 

But while energy is plentiful, it is not yet green. Though Dubai boasts the world’s largest single-site solar park and Abu Dhabi began generating electricity from the region’s first nuclear power station in 2020, gas still provided over 80% of the UAE’s power last year. The government therefore has a long way to go to reach its goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

Still, UAE-based organisations have a lot of experience when it comes to adapting to a hotter and drier climate. A priority area for the country, for example, is controlled-environment agriculture. Currently, the UAE imports around 85% of its food, reflecting the extreme difficulty of growing crops locally using conventional methods. But by investing in high-tech greenhouses and indoor vertical farms, where food is produced at a high density, Emirati companies are slowly increasing the volume of fruits, vegetables and leafy greens that can be grown in the desert.

Large-scale controlled-environment agribusiness operations — which require huge amounts of energy — are “the future of farming”, says Feras Al Soufi, general manager at Bustanica, a vertical farming venture outside Dubai established by Emirates airline and US-based company Crop One. 

“Water is a big challenge in the UAE,” says Mr Al Soufi, noting many other countries are also struggling to grow food where agricultural land is in short supply or the climate is unsuitable for crop-growing. He says Bustanica uses 95% less water than conventional methods of growing leafy greens. The facility — the largest of its kind in the world — irrigates its crops with nutrient-rich water in an extremely efficient manner, while also avoiding pesticides.

Testbed for climate adaptation

Controlled-environment agriculture is absolutely needed in a world where traditional agriculture is exposed to a changing climate, says Sky Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of Pure Harvest, which operates ‘smart farming’ in the UAE using greenhouse technology.

“This is one of the hardest climates on the planet, in terms of heat and humidity,” says Mr Kurtz, who tells us his company came to the UAE to prove that fruits and vegetables can be grown in greenhouses in the “worst of the worst” climates. 

After investing in a massive high-tech greenhouse, where many operations are automated, Pure Harvest now supplies around 20 types of fruit and vegetables to the local market (though many of the inputs, including peat and carbon dioxide, are imported). Mr Kurtz adds that the UAE has been highly receptive to foreign investment in agriculture, offering a good legal and regulatory system along with a large pool of capital. “We thought both strategically and technologically, it was the right place to start.”

As the world’s seventh largest oil producer, the UAE’s attempts to showcase its green credentials inevitably invite scepticism. National oil company Adnoc announced plans to increase its production capacity significantly last year, and the UAE remains close to the top of the global leaderboard for emissions per capita, partly due to its prodigious use of electricity for air conditioning and desalination. 

But the Gulf state’s massive wealth enables it to develop technologies to support the world in adapting to a harsher climate, while its successful agricultural innovations could pave the way for others to follow. As Mr Kurtz of Pure Harvest says: “If we could prove it here, we could do it anywhere.”

This article first appeared in the October/November 2023 print edition of fDi Intelligence