What can a historical understanding of Gulf societies’ interactions with the environment tell us about how global climate change affects the countries of the Gulf region? This paper presents research suggesting that detailed knowledge of the local environment was crucial for those living along the Gulf coast in the 19th and early 20th centuries to establish and maintain their existence. While much has changed in the political and economic structures of the region, climate change represents a serious challenge to the current push for economic diversification in the Gulf states by reducing their chance to reestablish these important connections to the environment, at the very moment in which global pressures to limit oil production are mounting. Through analysis of European travelogues, British colonial archives, and Arabic sources, I have found that contemporary societies in the Gulf littoral used the available resources in ways that only minimally disrupted the local ecosystem. Fishing provided a stable form of sustenance for coastal communities, homes were built of coral harvested from the sea, and many young men dove for pearls which were sold through Indian Ocean and Arabian Peninsula trade routes. Despite European travelers disparaging the region as uncivilized, locals engaged the environment in creative ways in order to find enough food, water, and trade goods to maintain their coastal lifestyle in the harsh environment. Twentieth-century changes, including international interest in the Gulf, the discovery and exploitation of oil resources, and artificially cultured pearls, damaged the traditional economy and replaced it with states made powerful by controlling oil profits. By the end of the 20th and into the 21st century, however, those same Gulf states began actively seeking economic diversification strategies in anticipation of the decline of oil revenues, either due to international pressure against fossil fuels or by exhausting their national oil reserves. Some diversification efforts include marketing traditional activities for tourists, such as pearling (tourists in Bahrain can collect up to 60 oysters a day), as well as restocking local waters to improve fishing for locals anglers. Shrimp and sharks are the only aquatic resources plentiful enough for export, though they are often harvested with modern, and more environmentally harmful, technologies. In sum, this paper argues that climate change in the Gulf has drastically affected the local relationship with the environment, and ultimately reduced these states’ ability to offset the future loss of oil revenues by exploiting traditional Gulf resources.