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.

The economies of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) rely almost exclusively on petroleum. Meanwhile, life in the Gulf requires the expenditure of large amounts of energy for water desalinization and climate control; Gulf regimes subsidize their citizens’ carbon-intensive lifestyles in exchange for political quiescence, such that insisting on more frugal consumption could potentially threaten the Gulf monarchs’ hold on power. In short, the economic, social, and political realities of the GCC provide strong incentives to perpetuate the exploitation of these countries’ petroleum resources. Yet there are financial incentives for these states to transition to domestic consumption of renewable fuels, while continuing to export hydrocarbons. Simultaneously, the Gulf is likely to face an environmental imperative to address climate change, as it experiences extreme weather conditions and rising seas threaten coastal populations. In the face of these competing incentives, the Gulf monarchies rhetorically endorse eco-friendly practices. For example, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have promised to reduce their production of greenhouse gases and to construct wind and solar energy facilities. Construction projects like Medina Masdar and Neom have been publicized as carbon-neutral cities of the future. What explains the eco-friendly rhetoric of Gulf regimes? Are these governments introducing substantive policies to transition from hydrocarbons? Or are these governments encouraging domestic consumption of renewables to sell more of their petroleum abroad? Is the rhetoric a “green-washing” legitimation strategy aimed at the international community, or an expression of performance legitimacy aimed at their own citizens? The research argues that expressions of eco-friendly rhetoric from Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are largely intended to reinforce the regimes’ performance legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens. By asserting their ability to use emerging technologies, harness renewable energy sources, and allegedly address the climate crisis, these regimes implicitly state the imperative for their continued hold on power, implying that without their strong leadership, their countries face potential disaster. Findings are drawn from economic data, and supplemented through interviews with Saudi and Emirati experts and officials engaged in urban development and energy policy. The research offers insights into the ways in which authoritarian regimes may seek to use concerns about climate change to secure their continued rule. By manufacturing an image of the state as hyper-modern, cutting edge, and technocratically able to solve seemingly intractable problems, such rhetoric demonstrates how the climate crisis may serve to reinforce the political status quo.

In a world beset by intensifying climate change mainly produced by combustion of fossil fuel, Saudi Arabia is ground zero. The firm accountable for the single largest contribution to that warming is the kingdom’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco. Oil and gas produced by Aramco is responsible for just under 5 percent of global emissions, the largest share of any single firm anywhere in the world.(1) At the same time, the kingdom’s intense summer climate faces the potential of being warmed into intolerability by century’s end.(2) Despite the implied climate damage to its homeland, Saudi Aramco is moving to expand, streamline and protect its system of oil monetization, so that the Saudi NOC can produce and market the kingdom’s prodigious below-ground reserves “for generations to come,” as its 2019 bond prospectus states. This paper investigates the policies that Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy is developing to protect its economy and political institutions from its exposure to risks around continued use of fossil fuels, and particularly the potential reduction in oil rents that threatens social welfare expenditures meant to buy public support for the regime. For Saudi Aramco, climate threats are partially offset by opportunities, given the company’s status as the producer with the world’s lowest cost basis and lowest intensity of greenhouse gas emissions per barrel produced.(3) These attributes suggest that oil from the kingdom should retain a prominent role in oil markets, particularly under climate constraints. However, Aramco’s quest to remain the “last man standing” in global oil will depend not just on its cost advantages but on continued enhancement of its carbon competitiveness. 1. Benoit Mayer and Mikko Rajavuori, “National Fossil Fuel Companies and Climate Change Mitigation under International Law,” Syracuse J. Int’l L. & Com. 44 (2016): 55. 2. Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia Projected to Exceed a Threshold for Human Adaptability,” Nature Clim. Change 6, no. 2 (February 2016): 197–200. 3. Garvin A Heath et al., “Global Carbon Intensity of Crude Oil Production,” Science 361, no. NREL/JA-6A20-70554 (2018).

In October 2008, Abdulnasser Gharem, a Saudi conceptual artist, unveiled Sirat—a 129.6” x 180” photograph displaying the ruins of a bridge, which had been devastated just after its construction in 1980 by a flash flood at a considerable loss of life. Gharem added to the power of the piece by showing the bridge heading into a dark abyss and spray-painting on it the word Sirat (“path”), a term with deep cultural and religious significance for Saudis. This type of failure was common and terrified many Saudis, who privately feared that their country’s infrastructure could not address major environmental change. In 2009, only a year after Sirat was shown publicly, Saudis’ concerns about their roads and bridges exploded into public debate following catastrophic Jeddah floods. This paper explores how Gharem and other Saudi creatives have utilized the environment as a frame for their work while expressing the feelings and experiences of their society in ways that politicians, religious elites, and others cannot. Through extensive in-country/online research and interviews with male and female Saudi creatives, it shows how the environment has been a central theme for the country’s contemporary artistic community from its earliest days to today when the movement has won a national and global following. Examples include Ahmed Mater, another leading artist, who in 2016 used his work, Evolution of Man, to bring attention to the environmental protests in Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the January 2020 exhibit in Jeddah sponsored by the Saudi Arts Council entitled “I love You, Urgently,” in which Saudi artists presented works dealing with the environment. This argument builds on the pioneering work of Toby Jones (2010) and Pascal Ménoret (2013) on the environment and urban and economic planning in Saudi Arabia along with Sean Foley (2019) on Saudi artists and their works. In particular, it utilizes Foley’s concept of artists as organic intellectuals capable of voicing mass public opinion while remaining “apolitical.” The paper also explores how and why many Saudi artists, if they are linked directly or indirectly to the country’s state, are widely assumed in the West to be “lesser” artists and dismissed as propagandists. These attitudes have angered many artists, including Muhannad Shono, who told Artnet in January 2020, “I am not part of some propaganda machine.” Rather, this research argues that a focus on the environment, and issues related to it, allows these creatives to publicly explore sensitive issues.

How does environmental consciousness permeate the definition of morality among religious elites in Kuwait? Since the start of the “Islamic Awakening” throughout the Muslim world in the late 1970s, religious leaders have communicated their definition of a moral society through the social causes and policy agendas for which they advocate. In Kuwait, the rise of political Islam has led to religious institutions increasing their grip on the different levers of government and consequently on society’s psyche when it comes to advocating for conservative policy objectives. Examples include recent pushes for gender segregation in education, aggressive censorship of speech, and the banning of events promoting different forms of art. Yet absent from all of this religious mobilization is any embrace of environmental advocacy. This absence is surprising, as there is a sizable body of literature that highlights the emphasis in Islamic teachings on embracing a stewardship environmental ethic that mandates active sustainable management of the natural environment (Foltz, Denny, & Haji, 2003; Jamieson, 2001). Further, the absence of environmentalism from the narrative of morality in Kuwait has led to increased stigmatization of environmentally friendly attitudes such as recycling and reduction of waste. This research project explores the following question: Why do narratives of morality among the religious elite in Kuwait ignore or even degrade values of environmental stewardship and sustainability? I argue that in Kuwait, where conservative Islamists are a part of the semi-democratic monarchical system, sociopolitical advocacy by the religious elite has been limited by the country’s economic (and political) dependence on fossil fuel revenues. This dependence has muted Islamist groups in national conversations around future transformations of Kuwait’s economy away from fossil fuels. This research employs Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), drawing from a combination of original surveys and semi-structured interviews with important Kuwaiti religious leaders and groups (Al-Mudaires, 2006; Herb, 2016), to investigate this puzzle. The survey questions test the relative rank of environmentally oriented definitions of morality in comparison with other causes that dominate the agenda of the religious right. The results of this micro-level narrative analysis are complimented with semi-structured interviews with the same individuals in the sample. Together, the original data develop a grounded theory that explains the dominant definition of morality and the gap between prominent stewardship teachings in Islamic scripture and environmentally destructive socioeconomic systems that still thrive in Kuwait, with lessons for the saliency of environmentalism in fellow Gulf monarchies with hydrocarbon-based economies.