Going green doesn’t come naturally to wealthy villa owners in the Gulf. An online real estate company listed a seven bedroom villa in Dubai’s neighboring Emirate Abu Dhabi for $95,300 a year, which amounts to nearly $8,000 a month. Anyone who can afford to spend that much money on rent probably has little incentive to […]
IRENA Innovation Week is a three-day event that unites leading thinkers and policy makers to explore disruptive innovation aimed specifically at accelerating a transition to renewable energy. All members of the media – print, and digital – are invited to register to attend (and report on!) IRENA Innovation Week happening in Bonn, Germany from September 5 to […]
Etihad Airways has opened its new Etihad Eco Residence project in Abu Dhabi, the world’s first purpose-built, LEED Platinum-rated cabin crew accommodation project, offering . The project, resulting from a partnership with Masdar, provides 500 fully furnished one and two-bedroom flight crew apartments contained in 11 buildings at Masdar City. “The opening of the landmark Etihad Eco Residence […]
Plans were announced today for the new Deira Mall in Dubai, which will be the largest in terms of leasable space in the entire United Arab Emirates (UAE). Development of the largest mall in the Middle East presents a blank canvas on which the developers could paint a green masterpiece, but there is not a […]
A new report published by Siemens predicts that the share of renewables in the Middle East energy mix will triple over the next 17 years. That’s the good news. The bad news is that natural gas will remain the dominant power source in the region.
French architects Ateliers Jean Nouvel designed the complex shell of Louvre Abu Dhabi, a project under development for over a decade before finally opening to the public earlier this month. A new timelapse video from EarthCam captures the eight-year-long construction process from groundbreaking to completion, from the enormous earth moving enabling works to the final […]
Starting January 28, it will be the year of the monkey as per the Chinese calendar, but in the United Arab Emirates it will be time for cheetahs, leopards and many other exotic animals to celebrate. A newly passed law renders possession of “all types of wild and domesticated but dangerous animals” as a pet […]
This year’s World Environment Day (WED) put a high beam on illegal trade of wildlife. Event sponsor, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), called on everyone to “go wild for life” and take action to help safeguard species under threat. In Saudi Arabia, a team of environmentalists and corporate volunteers took to a beach along […]
From vertical farming to rooftop gardening, here are 7 of the best agricultural companies and projects put in practice in the Middle East. There’s no getting around it: the world is becoming a much less secure place in which to live. Economies are tanking, geo-political systems are in turmoil, weather events such as wintertime drought are […]
Much of the Levant is under siege from a large dust storm right now covering Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel with parts of Cyprus and Turkey also affected. Meteorologists pin the poor weather on a low-pressure system that’s blanketing the region, and sands blown in from the east. The storm has prompted public health warnings, […]
Solar Impulse 2, the aircraft attempting to circumnavigate the world fueled only by sun power, will be grounded in Hawaii until next April for battery repairs. On July 3, the plane completed the longest leg of its global flight – a record-breaking (non-stop, solo piloted) five-day, five-night journey from Nagoya, Japan, to Hawaii – during […]
As spring turns into summer, the Khalifa fund’s investment in Abu Dhabi hydroponic agriculture is beginning to pay off. The Khalifa fund for enterprise development was Launched in 2007 to help local enterprise in Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of 2015, Ahmad Kalfan Al Romaithi revealed that Dh 130 million (approximately 35 million US dollars) […]
As of posting time for this story, pilot André Borschberg had been flying for over 24 hours on Leg 7 (of 12) of the Solar Impulse 2 trip around the planet. He’s completed about a quarter of his journey from Nanjing to Hawaii, the longest segment of this record-shattering expedition. And it’s all made possible […]
Cannes Film Festival is in full swing this week, but here in Jordan every day is a film festival thanks to vendors who hawk bootleg DVDs for a dinar apiece. That’s less than two bucks for a new release that would otherwise set you back $20 in a Manhattan theater. The downside with Amman’s cheap movies […]
Oryx, giraffes and cheetahs – species once facing regional extinction – are making a robust reappearance on a desert island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahayan, founder of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), created the remote nature reserve in 1971. Forty years after Sir Bani Yas island received its first ‘imported’ […]