In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, I stood in Bandar Al Khairan to broadcast a TED Talk on why women are part of the climate crisis solution. Behind me were the mangroves, the coves, and the deep blue waters that make Oman’s coastline feel both ancient and alive. It felt important to speak from there because the message was rooted in place. Climate change was never an abstract global issue to me. I had seen it in the sea, in the mountains, in cyclones, in communities, and in the lives of women who are often asked to carry the consequences of crisis before they are invited to help solve it.
The talk has now been watched more than a million times, and I still believe its central argument. Climate solutions are often framed through technology, finance, and policy. These tools are essential, yet societies are also part of the solution. Who we educate, who we empower, and who we trust to lead can determine whether climate action becomes truly resilient.
The recent Royal directive to allocate an additional seat for Omani women in the Majlis Ash’shura in each governorate brings this argument home. It is a milestone for representation, and a recognition that the future of national development must be guided by more of the people who live its consequences.
Representation is the visible measure of the directive. Its deeper significance is one of timing. Oman is entering a decade where many of its hardest choices will be environmental. Water, land, coastlines, cities, and food systems will determine how people live, work, and plan for the future.
These choices cannot stay distant from lived experience. A policy may begin in a chamber, but it eventually arrives in a home, a school, a farm, or a fishing village. It arrives in how people manage heat, protect livelihoods, and respond when the familiar rhythms of nature begin to change. A coastal zoning line reaches the family whose livelihood has always come from the shore. The people who absorb these choices first rarely sit where they are made.
Women already stand in many of those places. They lead in institutions, classrooms, clinics, businesses, and civil society. They understand the daily negotiations that hold families and communities together, and they are among those building the response itself. Omani women run the laboratories that study our seas and the planning teams behind water and energy decisions, and they start the enterprises that a green economy will rely on. Their expertise is technical as much as it is social, and both belong where the country’s priorities are set. Their presence in the Majlis Ash’shura can bring these realities closer to national debate.
The significance of these 11 seats will be measured by what they make possible. Presence is the beginning. These seats give women a hand in shaping the questions before the country, as Oman works towards a future that is more resilient, more sustainable, and more honest about the lives behind its policies.
A sustainable future is carried by the people who live inside its choices. When I made that argument from the shore at Bandar Al Khairan, it was one voice speaking into the wind. Oman has now written it into how the country decides. The women taking these seats will help set the questions before the nation, and every hard choice ahead will be answered by more of the people who live it.
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