Environmental Development and Protection in the UAE

The United Arab Emirates is a predominantly arid land containing habitats and communities adapted to survive both small amounts of infrequent precipitation, and extremes of heat with consequent high evaporative losses. It is an exacting environment. Nonetheless, mankind has exploited the land now known as the UAE since the Late Stone Age, 7500 years Before Present (BP), although then the climate was wetter than it is today. Game would have been abundant on the Acacia savannah and neighbouring grasslands and even in the deep sands the basic necessities of life would have been available. Only the ingenuity and technology to exploit these resources would have been required to survive in relative affluence. Since those times there has been a trend toward increasing aridity, demanding a nomadic huntergathering lifestyle. It was solely in the relatively well-watered Hajar Mountains, with their permanent running supply, that cultivation would have been possible, a development which took place only in antiquity. Terraced fields there attest to such an agricultural economy (see Heard-Bey, this volume). Today this system has fallen into disuse, although the proximal cause was a shift in the socio-economic base rather than necessarily the increasing irregularity of winter rainfall. The marine environment would, quite naturally, have proved the focus for human activity, assuming freshwater sources existed in the vicinity. That they did is known from the archaeological record (see Potts, this volume), with evidence from some island localities of continuous occupation over at least the past four or five millennia (Hellyer 1998, 1999). Even today, in perhaps the driest period the UAE has ever experienced, there are still potable supplies, including on some of the offshore islands where rain itself rarely falls. (The island of Dalma, as can be recalled by many still today, once provided drinking water to the fishing settlement which later grew to become the city of Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE!) Recent anecdotal accounts provide confirmation of a long-suspected assertion that submarine freshwater springs would once have been utilized to sustain certain coastal and island communities. In contrast to the past, when the human population was still small and natural resources were used sustainably without conscious effort, a burgeoning human population, increased longevity and commercial exploitation have served to put mounting pressure on the environment. Commercial fish catches in the Arabian Gulf continue to decline, for example, despite a general