The architecture of absence

The questions arrived this past couple of weeks on the back of the Winter Olympics. Reporters were asking athletes about melting snow, about venues that may not exist in a generation, about what it means to build a career on a surface the climate is slowly erasing.
Somewhere in that conversation, someone got in touch with me and asked why Arab athletes are silent on climate change. I have been sitting with that question ever since, not because it is simple, but because it is not.
I spent most of my youth as an athlete, and a scientist studying our environment for much of that time too. So I came to these questions from both sides, from the body that trained in heat and the mind that studied what that heat means at scale. And what I kept returning to was this: we live on a planet where the crisis does not stop at any border we have drawn. The athlete training in forty-five degree heat in Muscat and the skier watching her mountain lose snow in the Alps are inside the same emergency. The timeline differs. The visibility differs enormously. But the destination, if we do nothing, is shared by all of us equally.
And yet the conversation keeps dividing along the same lines. Western athletes speak, and the infrastructure exists to carry their voices globally. Media, sponsors, NGOs, communications teams, all of it organised around turning individual concern into a public movement. Here, the concern is just as real, often more visceral because the heat is already here, already inside the training session, already the reason you move your entire camp to higher ground when the coast becomes unworkable in summer. But the system to catch that concern and amplify it does not exist in the same way. So the silence gets misread as absence. As indifference. As falling behind. It is none of those things.
Michael Haddad, a para-athlete from Lebanon, walked five kilometres across the Arctic on an exoskeleton and crutches to deliver seed samples from twelve Arab countries, including Oman, to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. He carried this out as UNDP Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Climate Action, appointed in 2019, and he is now preparing a hundred-kilometre walk across the same terrain. The story is extraordinary by any measure. It is also, outside certain circles, largely unknown. Not because it lacks meaning or ambition or courage. Because the machine that turns meaning into reach is not evenly distributed across this world, and never has been.
The World Cup hosted in Qatar showed this region is capable of delivering climate-conscious sport at the highest scale, with cooling infrastructure, rescheduled fixtures and a compact design built around the environment we actually live in rather than the one we wish we had. These were not compromises. They were solutions developed from necessity and executed with precision. Oman's Olympic Committee is building in the same direction, working to embed sustainability into national sporting events and facilities in ways that reflect a longer view of what sport in this climate requires.
So when I am asked why Arab athletes are silent, I find I cannot answer cleanly. The silence is not what it looks like from the outside. Pointing at individuals when the architecture to support them is missing feels like the wrong place to look. And the crisis, in the end, does not pause for any of these distinctions. It is coming for all of us, in every kind of heat, on every kind of snow, under the same sky.