Salalah's growth to move beyond greenbelt

SALALAH, SEPT 9
A Sultan Qaboos University study has ranked parts of Salalah and Taqah among Oman’s three most suitable areas for new urban development, while finding that a new urban community outside Dhofar’s main vegetation belt could ease pressure on vegetation.
Only 2.1 per cent of Oman's land area fell into the study's highest suitability class. Three locations qualified: a stretch of Arabian Sea coast between Al Jazir and Duqm, Salalah and Taqah in the south, and Sohar in the north.
The study does not treat them as equals. It identifies Duqm as the highest priority and the most suitable location in the country, citing its physical conditions, renewable-energy potential, infrastructure and proximity to the port. The highly suitable zone there extends for roughly 100 kilometres along the coast, compared with about 20 kilometres at each of Salalah and Sohar.
For Dhofar, the finding is narrower but more immediate. Although vegetation has come under pressure from urban encroachment and climatic factors, the study says a new urban community outside the main vegetation belt could ease pressure on that natural resource.
The finding comes as official planning material gives differing estimates of how large Salalah may become by 2040.
Planning scenarios presented by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning at the final-framework workshop on July 13 projected Greater Salalah's population rising from around 378,500 in 2024 to nearly 613,000 by 2040, while employment could increase from approximately 191,750 to more than 357,000.
The ministry has used a higher figure elsewhere. A New City Salalah planning document projects Wilayat Salalah reaching about 674,000 people by 2040. Greater Salalah's planning boundary includes Salalah and part of Taqah, making it a broader geography than the wilayat alone. The same 674,000 total was repeated in a ministry presentation on water and infrastructure on August 30, this time as the population capacity for Greater Salalah. The source material does not explain the discrepancy, so the figures should be treated as different planning forecasts rather than a single settled projection.
The July framework also identified 261 proposed interventions with an estimated investment requirement of RO 4.3 billion through 2040. Strategic spatial development accounted for around RO 1.89 billion, while sustainability and climate-related measures were estimated at about RO 469 million. These are planning estimates rather than approved government expenditure or confirmed investment commitments.
The study, by Mohamed E Hereher of SQU's Geography Department and published in the 2026 volume of the journal Sustainability, used satellite-derived data and Geographic Information System analysis at national scale.
It evaluates seven factors: topography, diurnal temperature range, relative humidity, atmospheric dust, wind speed, solar radiation and access to electricity. Each carries equal weight, a deliberate choice to create a baseline model without subjective weighting.
It does not prescribe where individual neighbourhoods, roads or developments should be built. Hereher identifies several limitations, including the relatively coarse resolution of some datasets, reliance on remotely sensed data because ground meteorological stations are sparse, and the absence of different climate-change scenarios. He recommends feasibility studies and pilot projects in all three highly suitable regions.
Detailed planning would also need to weigh groundwater, biodiversity, agriculture, flood risk, infrastructure capacity, land ownership and local community requirements — issues that fall outside the model's seven-factor assessment.
An earlier SQU-led study shows how far Dhofar's landscape has already changed. Published in IEEE Access in 2022, it used satellite imagery from 1978 to 2018 across the governorate's mountains, plains and coastal areas. It found urban development increased by 173.3 per cent over the four decades, while vegetation cover declined by 36.4 per cent.
Its authors stressed that urbanisation alone did not explain the loss. Average air temperature across the study area rose by 0.8 degrees Celsius over the period, while precipitation fell by 104mm.
They also recorded a 23.2 per cent reduction in plant species in coastal areas and 18.5 per cent in the mountains, and warned that 48 species found only in Dhofar are threatened with extinction because of construction and urbanisation. The study recommended making biodiversity a priority in urban projects, particularly at sites holding rare species.
The significance of those findings grows as Greater Salalah moves beyond the final-framework stage towards implementation.
Oman's Urban Planning Law, issued under Royal Decree 58/2026 and in force since May, establishes the statutory framework for urban planning and requires the Minister of Housing and Urban Planning to issue its executive regulation and the decisions needed to implement the law. Until they are issued, existing regulations and decisions continue to apply where they do not conflict with the law.
The framework presented in July integrates housing, economic activity, infrastructure, transport, heritage and environmental resilience within a single spatial system rather than treating them as separate development questions.
That matters in Dhofar because undeveloped land is not necessarily unproductive land. Parts of the Salalah plain support agriculture. Mountain areas support grazing and biodiversity. The green landscape underpins the governorate's Khareef tourism economy, while natural terrain and watercourses influence groundwater recharge and flood behaviour.
Land therefore carries competing values. A plot may carry value for housing or commercial development, while neighbouring land may generate greater long-term value through agriculture, tourism, water protection, biodiversity or flood management. The planning challenge is to determine which land is best suited to each purpose.
Hereher’s study offers one tool for making that distinction at a broad scale. Its identification of Salalah–Taqah is not an argument for unrestricted construction, and its finding on development outside the vegetation belt points towards a more selective model. How that distinction is reflected in statutory planning practice will depend in part on the executive regulation and subsequent implementing decisions.
A significant information gap remains. The detailed vegetation and urban-expansion data end in 2018. Extending the same satellite methodology to 2026 would show what happened during the intervening eight years and provide a consistent baseline for future decisions under the Greater Salalah framework.
It could reveal where development has expanded most rapidly, where vegetation has changed, and whether future growth is increasingly being directed towards land that can accommodate it at lower environmental cost. The same monitoring could then be repeated through to 2040.
Salalah's growth is not in question. The harder test is whether the region can absorb substantial additional population and economic activity while using land more efficiently than it has in the past four decades.
The scientific evidence increasingly points towards the same underlying question confronting planners: the future of Salalah will depend not only on how much it builds, but on where it builds.
Caption:
Parts of Salalah and Taqah have been ranked among Oman’s three most suitable areas for new urban development