A recent story in the Times reports:
“A noxious tide of toilet paper, raw sewage and chemical waste has transformed Dubai’s most prestigious stretch of shoreline into a foul-smelling health hazard.
A stretch of the exclusive Jumeirah Beach — a magnet for Western tourists and home to a string of hotels — has been closed.”
This particular article is a bit over dramatized, but it is typical of the environmental horror stories that are common in press coverage of the UAE, both international and domestic. In this case, the culprit was workers dumping waste into storm drains that led directly to the beach. Tomorrow the story could be shipping waste, air pollution, helicopter noise, the list goes on. There is no doubt that pollution of the Gulf is a big problem on the way to becoming a huge one.
The UAE government is certainly aware of the problem, and seems keen clamp down on domestic polluters. It has also conducted bilateral deals with Bahrain, for example this agreement recently renewed on limiting fishing. But the problem is that the Gulf is a small ecological neighborhood, so bilateral deals can only go so far. Any serious efforts to combat problems like water pollution or overfishing will require coordination of all the Gulf states.
A few months back al-Jazeera reported that the GCC and Iran were studying a joint security apparatus. This went nowhere, largely I would guess because of the huge amounts of tension on the geopolitical level over things like the three islands dispute, the nuclear issue, perceived Iranian meddling in the Levant, etc.
Given this, I would think some type of joint Iran-GCC effort on environmental issues have a much better chance of getting somewhere than security talks. Could it actually work? I don’t know, but its certainly something to watch going forward.
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