During a guest lecture in Muscat, I asked students one question: What will Oman look like in 2100? Their answers came bright and certain. Greener, they said. Less dependent on oil. New energies everywhere. Yet, I could not shake the image of nine small coffins carried through streets wet with rain in Samad al Shan last year.
The children, aged between 10 and 14 from the same family, were lost to sudden floods just days after Eid, swept away by waters no one anticipated. Their village mourned futures that would never unfold. Scientists, teachers, and leaders who would never have the chance to build the Oman my students imagined.
These students were at the start of their first semester in specialised energy programmes. If anyone should know how to evaluate whether that beautiful future can be built, it should be them. So I spent the morning showing them how to assess new energy projects against the reality of a changing climate. How to ask whether infrastructure can survive cyclones we've never seen before. How to measure decisions against what's already happening to real people in real places.
Each cohort I've taught told me the same thing afterward: no one had shown them this lens. I was invited to fill a gap that should not exist, and we see the stakes visible across the world. That same week, survivors of Super Typhoon Rai filed a lawsuit in the United Kingdom against Shell. The storm killed over 400 people in the Philippines in 2021. The families are naming what was lost and asking who bears responsibility. Projects everywhere are beginning to be measured not just against technical specifications but against human cost. From one Omani village to hundreds of villages in the Philippines, the cost is counted in lives.
Oman, too, must take stock. Cyclone Gonu devastated Muscat in 2007. Years later, floods swept through Samad al Shan, taking nine children from a single family. Seventeen years separate these events, which is not an anomaly but an pattern. Storms are intensifying with warming waters and arriving with a force that infrastructure built for yesterday’s climate cannot withstand.
When we approve an energy project, we approve assumptions about what the future will be like. We choose whether to design for the climate we used to have or the one we are entering. Every choice either accounts for what happened in that village, with a school built within the wadi’s tracks, or assumes water will not rise that fast again.
The students understood once the link was clear. One student leaned back, and I watched something shift in how she saw the work ahead, which was encouraging to see. The troubling part is that this framework is rarely core in other programmes. Many who begin specialised degrees lack tools to judge projects against climate reality. Graduates will step into roles that approve roads, substations, and ports. Some will make those calls without this knowledge.
What happens between now and 2100 depends on whether someone reviewing a proposal this week knows to ask if the design assumes the climate we remember or the climate that is already here. In the Philippines, 400 families are asking who is responsible. In Samad al Shan, the Abdali tribe will mark another Eid with a loss that does not soften. The task now is to make this way of thinking standard. It cannot depend on a guest lecturer. It must live in every classroom and every approval meeting, the way communities like that village carry the memory of water that rose faster than anyone thought possible.
Rumaitha al Busaidi
The writer is an environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development. Follow her on LinkedIn @rumaithaalbusaidi
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