author - oman observer

We are only two months into 2026, and a lot has already shifted beneath our feet. In New York, the fourth session of the UN tax committee opened this week with an empty chair. The United States exited...

I noticed it in the smallest place first. The way my attention started stuttering, like a car misfiring on a familiar road. The way rest stopped feeling like rest, and became a guilty pause between...

Every year, I read the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report as if it were a weather map for the next decade. Coffee in hand, I skim the rankings, then I reread the parts that make the page feel...

This week, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week is unfolding under the theme, "The Nexus of Next, All Systems Go." It lands with honesty. In our region, the future rarely arrives as a single headline. It...

I have started to recognise the exact moment a climate conversation changes. It is when the language moves from aspiration to allocation, from pathways to payment. The room grows careful. Everyone...

There is a particular kind of patience you learn when you wait for turtles. The air carries salt and expectation. The sand feels blank, almost indifferent, until the first movement arrives. Soon, the...

Lately, I have had an influx of international friends visiting me in Oman. I observe myself building itineraries the way you build a story, with a beginning that feels rooted and a middle that...

On the trail from Riyam to Muttrah, the city falls away and the rock takes over. You climb past a rusted pipe that once carried diesel to an old generator station, a relic of a time when electricity...

“If hydrogen production and localisation stay in producer countries, Europeans lose jobs. And unemployment leads to fascism.”The European panellist's words hung in the air during our...

The fire broke out on Thursday afternoon. I watched the videos from Muscat: smoke billowing from the venue’s upper floors, delegates evacuating into Belém’s humid air, clutching laptops and...

One week of climate negotiations has lapsed in Belém, and to call the atmosphere charged would be an understatement. In windowless rooms reeking of instant coffee and anxiety, negotiators who speak...

Thirty years have passed since the start of climate talks. Ten years since the Paris Agreement. Now, as delegates gather in Belém for COP30, Hurricane Melissa has delivered a message louder than any...

The air is different this week. Heavy, ochre, thick with the weight of unseen lands. As a ghostly tide of dust blankets Muscat and much of North Oman, reducing the sky to a choking haze, we witness...

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...

In Al Duqm, Oman’s green hydrogen hubs are rising on a foundation of renewable energy and industrial-scale desalination. The infrastructure is already programmed: steady power, reliable water, and...

Every summit begins with vision statements. This one began with a ledger. The IUCN Conservation Congress treated conservation as a balance sheet of species, coastlines, and political will. The week...

Muscat felt like a harbour the night Sinbad the Omani Sailor opened. The hall lifted with strings and voices as an old voyage met a new century. Days earlier, I had stood at the Berkeley Forum,...

New York offered a study in stillness and motion. One minute the city surged, the next it paused. President Trump’s motorcade locked an avenue in place, and even the French president stood waiting...

I spent last week in Hong Kong at the Belt and Road Summit, a gathering that feels like a living map. You can hear trade routes in the hallway, see ports and rail lines in a speaker’s hand gesture,...

I woke today to a sky the colour of pewter, the kind that makes the sea pause. In Oman, we read the weather like a familiar poem. The shamal, the slow build of heat over the Gulf, the khareef mist...