United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century carrying three structurally important facts that will shape its tourism sector for the rest of the century. Its resident population has grown more quickly than nearly any credible projection foresaw, reaching 11.29 million by the end of 2024 — a 5.7 percent single-year increase driven almost entirely by net in-migration, with Dubai crossing four million residents in September 2025 and daytime peak-winter population there exceeding five million. The country has become, in roughly twenty-four months, the most consequential non-Western node in the global build-out of artificial-intelligence infrastructure: a five-gigawatt UAE–US AI Campus is rising in Abu Dhabi, anchored by the one-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster, with its first 200 megawatts due in the third quarter of 2026. And the natural ecosystems that define the most distinctive parts of UAE tourism — the heat-adapted coral reefs of the Arabian Gulf, the Avicennia marina mangrove fringe along the Abu Dhabi coast, and the dugong populations of the Marawah biosphere — are already operating very close to thermal ceilings that climate change is steadily pushing past.

The climate envelope inside which the UAE's outdoor tourism product must operate is narrowing on a known trajectory. Climate-model ensembles project the country's mean annual temperature rising from roughly 28°C today to 31–32°C by the last two decades of the century under a moderate-emissions pathway, and to 33–34°C under a high-emissions one. More important than mean temperature is the compound heat-and-humidity threshold beyond which the human body cannot shed metabolic heat. Under a business-as-usual emissions trajectory, several Gulf cities, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, are projected to exceed the 35°C wet-bulb survivability threshold several times during the 2071–2100 window, with what is now a once-in-twenty-days hot summer condition becoming an ordinary summer day. The April 2024 flood — 254.8 millimetres in under twenty-four hours at Khatm Al Shakla near Al Ain, the heaviest single-day rainfall since records began in 1949, with insurance losses on the order of three billion dollars — is the most useful single data point for the regime change in extreme precipitation. Drainage standards designed around mid-twentieth-century climatology are systematically undersized for what is now routine.

Sea-level rise compounds the problem. The likely range for global mean sea-level rise by 2100 is between roughly 0.44 and 1.01 metres depending on the emissions pathway, with low-confidence high-end scenarios involving Antarctic ice-sheet instability potentially adding another metre. The Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan already uses a planning envelope of roughly one metre plus a one-in-hundred-year storm surge. Given the extraordinarily low gradient of the coastal plain — the outer crescent of Palm Jumeirah sits only about three metres above mean sea level — even the central projection threatens substantial low-lying tourism real estate by century's end, and high-end scenarios become existential for it.

The marine ecosystems story is, on the whole, one of accepting structural decline in the reef while leaning into the more resilient assets. The Arabian Gulf hosts the world's most heat-tolerant corals, but their population-level capacity to absorb further warming is already saturated. The 2017 marine heatwave killed roughly three-quarters of corals on reefs in the southern Gulf. The 2021 event, with sea-surface temperatures reaching 37.7°C, caused the first documented mass bleaching on the cooler Gulf-of-Oman side of the country and killed up to ninety percent of corals on some east-coast reefs. The most plausible 2100 scenario is coral cover declining below ten percent on most accessible shallow reefs by mid-century, with mound-forming Porites communities persisting as the structural backbone and branching acroporids largely lost. The reef-diving product transitions from coral viewing to fish and historic-wreck viewing, supplemented by assisted-migration restoration programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and Khalifa University, where cross-bred Gulf-and-Oman corals have shown promising survival uplifts under experimental heat stress.

Mangroves and seagrass are by far the more robust marine tourism assets. The UAE today has roughly sixty million existing mangroves covering about 183 square kilometres, concentrated at Eastern Mangrove National Park, Jubail Mangrove Park, Bu Tinah, Marawah, and the Sila–Dabaiya complex on the Saudi border. Drone-broadcast seeding and tissue-culture propagation, the latter pioneered by partnerships between the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi and private operators, brought roughly thirty million new trees into the ground by mid-2025, on a credible trajectory toward the hundred-million target announced at COP26. Realising that goal would bring cover to roughly 483 square kilometres and meaningfully increase carbon sequestration. The mangrove fringe, the seagrass meadows that support a dugong population on the order of three thousand individuals, and the Sir Bani Yas oryx-reintroduction project together form a nature-tourism portfolio that is far more climate-resilient than the reef.

The artificial-intelligence build is the genuinely new dimension. The 5-gigawatt UAE–US AI Campus, on a roughly 19-square-kilometre site in Abu Dhabi, is the largest AI infrastructure development outside the United States. Its first cluster alone equals the entire current output of the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant, whose four APR-1400 reactors entered full commercial operation in September 2024 and supply roughly a quarter of national electricity. Combined with the world-leading single-site solar parks at Al Dhafra, Noor Abu Dhabi, and Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Barakah gives the UAE one of the lowest-carbon grids in the Gulf and falling. Yet honest accounting requires acknowledging that the AI campus is explicitly designed to run on nuclear, solar, and natural gas, and that efficiency gains in successive generations of AI chips are more than offset by the scale of deployment — a textbook Jevons dynamic. Water is the more constrained dimension still: the Gulf's default cooling architecture has been chilled water plus evaporative towers, and in a country where over 99 percent of municipal freshwater is desalinated, that simply moves thermal load from servers to natural-gas-fired desalination plants. Mitigation through treated sewage effluent, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and two-phase immersion is genuine and accelerating, but per-facility consumption data remain largely unpublished, which is itself the most fixable reputational problem facing the sector.

The social and labour-market consequences will reshape the destination experience as much as climate or compute. UAE hospitality is overwhelmingly built on South Asian, Southeast Asian, East African, and Arab migrant labour, and the roles most exposed to displacement on a 2030–2050 horizon — kitchen back-of-house, cashier and retail, fixed-route driving, multilingual concierge work — are precisely those filled today by that workforce. The likely outcome is not mass unemployment but a hollowing of the migrant labour pipeline, with substantial remittance consequences for sending regions in Kerala, Sindh, the Philippines, Nepal, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Emiratisation policy meanwhile targets the high-status, climate-controlled, bilingual roles created by AI mediation. The country's significant investment in Arabic-capable open-source large language models — Falcon from the Technology Innovation Institute and Jais from G42's Inception team with MBZUAI and Cerebras — anchors a real claim to linguistic sovereignty, though dialect coverage for the languages of the diaspora communities that actually staff the sector remains uneven. AI-mediated concierge and heritage-interpretation systems will reflect those training-data choices.

Geography responds to all of this in legible ways. The cultural concentration on Saadiyat Island — Louvre Abu Dhabi joined in 2025 by teamLab Phenomena, the Natural History Museum, the Zayed National Museum with its five solar-thermal falcon-wing towers, and an early-2026 Guggenheim — creates one of the densest cultural-infrastructure clusters ever assembled, and it is air-conditioned, indoor, and climate-resilient by design. The Hajar Mountains, with Jebel Jais and Hatta, offer altitudinal cool refuges usable for eight to nine months a year even under high-emissions pathways. The Liwa desert-luxury product becomes increasingly winter-only and increasingly indoor, leaning on climate-controlled glamping and immersive heritage experiences. The Empty Quarter becomes a six-month destination rather than a nine-month one.

The most likely 2100 outcome is therefore a UAE tourism economy that has substantially decarbonised at the point of consumption — nuclear-and-solar-powered hotels, electrified ground transport, partly synthetic aviation fuel — but whose outdoor season has narrowed from roughly nine months to five or six. Identity shifts from outdoor mega-attraction toward an AI-mediated, indoor, curated cultural-and-compute economy. Business and cultural tourism — museums, the AI campus and its conference flow, GITEX-format expos — become the highest-yield, lowest-climate-sensitivity strategic anchor. The most important uncertainty over this horizon is not climate, which is increasingly knowable, but geopolitics. Regional war, disruption of the Strait of Hormuz through which roughly a quarter of global oil flows transits, or a breakdown of the US–UAE AI technology channel could each cut visitor flows by an order of magnitude on timescales much shorter than the climate signal. None of the demographic or tourism projections that look so confident on paper survive a six-month Hormuz closure. The path the UAE is on is coherent and substantially financed, but its arrival at 2100 will depend on neighbourhoods being kept open as much as on engineering them shut against the heat.