author - oman observer

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...

The wind at Manah does not care about design standards. This kept coming back to me after moderating last week’s Oman Climate Dialogue on renewable energy, where we had the regulator, the procurer,...

Coffee this week came with an unusual weight. The news had moved faster than the week itself, one development folding into the next before the previous one had time to settle. This triggered me to...

This week, I had the pleasure of serving as forum chair at a gathering that left more questions than answers. It made me feel, again, how deeply Oman needs more spaces where people from different...

I chose to run again for the board of the Environment Society of Oman this week. The election was held in the room, with live polls and the votes appearing on a screen at the front. Each number...

Eid felt different this year. The preparations carried the same rhythm they always do: the dressing up, the cooking, and the gathering of family. But the shuwa drowned. The pit that should have held...

War is usually narrated through maps. Front lines are drawn, strike zones are named, and theatres of operation are presented as if they have clear edges. Nature has never recognised those boundaries....

A memory has been returning to me with unusual force these past days. Inside the Ukraine pavilion at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, war and climate were being held in the same frame. Delegates were being...