author - oman observer

Oman has spent decades learning to keep buildings cool beneath a punishing sun. In the Netherlands, buildings designed to hold warmth are increasingly confronting summer heat they were never built to...

I had goosebumps before I reached the end of the walkway. For Omani Youth Day, the Youth Centre had turned the space into a passage through a year's worth of work, installations and projects...

At Windsor Castle on Tuesday evening, I found myself speaking to King Charles III about protecting marine life. Of all the conversations I imagined having at a State Banquet, this was perhaps the one...

There is a peculiar difference between walking through a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood and navigating a busy road with traffic on either side. In one, the mind seems to wander freely, while in the...

An Economy the World Can Buy Into This week the world's investors were told, in the careful language of an index review, that Oman's stock market has never been closer to their reach. A...

When the player who completed Oman's comeback against Kuwait pulled off his shirt in delight, the referee booked him, and the caution left Oman and Iraq identical in every column the Gulf Cup...

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...