Dubai:
A new environmental sustainable policy centre for the Middle East is set to open its headquarters in Dubai by the end of 2016, a senior UN official said on Thursday.
In partnership with the Dubai Land Department and the United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP), the new Centre of Resource Efficient and Sustainable Cities for the Arab Region will serve as a catalyst to inspire 14 Arab countries to adopt innovative, low-carbon and green building initiatives for a brighter ecological future for the region, said Arab Hoballah, UNEP Director of Sustainable Consumption and Production.
Hoballah’s global UN division is based in Paris and focuses on building capacity for resource efficiency.
Speaking to Gulf News after an address to delegates at the inaugural Dubai Sustainable Cities Summit on Thursday in Dubai, Hoballah said it made sense when he selected Dubai as a regional hub given its forward-looking, benchmark-driven optimism for the future.
When completed, the new centre will join other regional UN-backed policy centres already open or in the works in Singapore, China and South America.
“Dubai is doing different things, you have people who are willing to make a difference,” Hoballah said in an exclusive interview. “The political will is here, the resources are here. Dubai can put its resources in line with its policies,” he said.
Hoballah likened Dubai’s futuristic embrace of innovation to build a low-carbon city to that of a virtual laboratory where up to 50 new staff at the new regional policy centre will take stock in the new year of new Dubai ideas, their implementation and then measure their successes.
“Dubai could be a good ‘laboratory’ where we have interesting things, test them, implement them and then scale them up,” Hoballah said.
He said many cutting-edge environmentally friendly projects, such as the Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Al Marmum, have enormous potential to help other Arab countries adopt similar technologies to move toward renewable-energy targets.
Using Dubai as a solid example, the Middle East and North Africa region could collectively build and link a pan-Arab solar network from UAE to Morocco that could feed electricity generated from interconnected Arab countries into the European Union’s power grid, he suggested.
The potential for the new Dubai-based policy centre is limited only by the emirate’s imagination.
The central thrust behind the centre, said Hoballah, is a “holistic, comprehensive approach to finding what will benefit them (people in the Arab region) and their children.”
