author - oman observer

Early in my career, I studied farmers along the Batinah Plain, and some of them were thinking about raising fish because the sea had come in under their gates and into their wells. My work with them...

Three days in Muscat, and the halls of Oman Climate Week were full of people who do not normally share a building. Ministry officials, bankers, scientists, students, engineers and people who run...

Some years ago I stood on a TEDx stage and asked a room to close their eyes and picture Oman in 2100. Then I gave them the projections. A rise of around 4°C for this country, against 1.3°C the world...

Last week’s footage from Nepal asks the eye to accept something it doesn’t understand. One moment, the valley is green and legible, its river contained between fields, roads and houses; the next,...

Most days, a wadi in Oman looks like empty ground. The stillness is convincing enough to make permanence feel plausible; heat settles over gravel, the channels remain dry, and all that open space can...

There is an hour before sunrise on our coast when the tide has finished its work and left everything it carried in a single line along the sand, shells and weed and cuttlebone and the occasional float...

A friend sent me a post he had written about becoming athletic in his thirties. He had spent most of his twenties building a career and had decided somewhere along the way, without examining the...

Before every mountain, there is the private arithmetic of what can be carried. Crampons, ice axe, ascender, down mitts: each must justify its weight. Higher up, excess becomes consequence. And yet the...

The phone in my hand was drawing about 1 watt when I read that Nvidia is reportedly in talks with OpenAI over a proposed data centre project in southern Ohio. Its planned power capacity was a number...

I have a friend in Chicago who calls the city home, and last week he told me the sky above it was unlike anything he had seen. The smoke had come down from Canada. Last Thursday the index read 747 on...

The sofa in my sitting room is worn now, thin across the seat and frayed where the arms meet the cushions. The frame under it is sound, so I went looking for covers online a few weeks ago, a...

I have stood at enough gates to hear the announcement before it comes. The airline is looking for volunteers. The flight is oversold, because airlines sell more tickets than an aircraft has seats on...

I landed in Geneva and felt as if I was melting. The irony was lost on no one. People joked that the heat should be nothing to me, since I come from a hot country. We survive heat through what...

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...

It began as a single line in a meeting. One of the leaders said, almost in passing, that Oman needs to embed decarbonisation the way it embedded In-Country Value, tied directly to corporate...

Someone sent me an image this week, passed around as a joke. The premise was simple: slap environmental protection fees in negotiations, and watch it begin to sound like an act of stewardship. Others...

Someone asked me, in the days before the holiday, whether I was ready for Eid. I gave the usual answer, the one of logistics: the shopping, the cooking, the small economics of who visits whom and...

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...

For the third time in 50 years, an energy crisis in the Gulf is being used as evidence for opposite arguments. One side says the war proves we cannot afford the transition. The other side says it...

A few months ago, I was invited to speak to a group of visitors exploring Oman. The conversation took place on a morning sail off the coast of Muscat, the water still in that early flatness before the...