The writer is an environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development
By May, the heat has settled in, and with it the part of the year when Oman draws more electricity than at any other time. Across the country air conditioners come on together and stay on, and the grid climbs toward the peak it now reaches every summer, higher than the summer before.
We have built our modern life on the assumption that the power will be there to meet that climb, the way an older Oman built its life on the assumption that the falaj would run. Both assumptions are coming under strain in the same season, for reasons that turn out to be connected.
Half a world away, the Pacific is warming again in the rhythm the forecasters call El Niño, and this time the language around it has sharpened.
The major centres expect it to emerge within weeks with a growing chance it becomes one of the most intense events ever recorded, rivalling the benchmarks of 2015 and even 1877. The warming does not stay where it begins. It moves rainfall, presses on food production, and lands eventually on places already carrying the least slack.
For an arid country, the warning is less about a storm on a given day than about the tightening of a system already close to its limits.
Consider what summer already asks of us. The heat that drives every household to cool itself at once is the same heat that weakens the gas plants generating most of our power, because a turbine produces less as the air feeding it grows hotter.
Demand rises in the very conditions that pull supply down. The same pressure reaches our water, since we draw it now from two sources, and the heat squeezes both.
Much of our water is desalinated, and desalination runs on the same stressed grid, so a hard summer for electricity is also a hard summer for water.
The older source is the falaj, which carried this civilisation for five thousand years on gravity and patience, and it is failing too, a third of these channels are in decline and a quarter stopped entirely as deep pumps draw the aquifers down faster than the rare rains refill them.
When both the modern system and the ancient one fail in the same season, there is nothing older to fall back on. An El Niño that disturbs those rains deepens a difficulty we have long managed by drawing on reserves that are running thin.
This is the part of arid life that rarely reaches the climate conversation, which prefers the drama of the flood to the slow arithmetic of the dry year. We are good at responding to the cyclone that arrives and announces itself.
We are far less practised at planning for the season that simply behaves a little worse than the last, year upon year, until the margin we assumed was there is gone.
Resilience here looks less like emergency response and more like honest accounting, the patient work of building the likelihood of a difficult El Niño into the plans we make long before the season turns.
The old separation between protecting the environment and protecting the economy has worn through. In a country like ours, they were always the same task wearing two names.
So the test ahead is not really the warming that may reach us by year’s end. It is whether we can plan for a climate that has stopped holding still, while the falaj runs lower and the grid climbs higher and the two of them, old and new, keep telling us the same thing in different centuries.
Rumaitha Al Busaidi
The writer is environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
