Cop28 How Dubai is using the climate talks to build its image and influence

The Dubai skyline is designed to inspire wonder, the sparkling glass towers reflecting the desert sky.

- Ruth Michaelson

At the northern end of the emirate, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, juts into the atmosphere. 

If you face the tower with your back to a neighbourhood that largely houses migrant workers, you can gaze at it through a 150-metre-high gold frame – also the world’s largest – intended to present the real-life cityscape as though looking at a photo.

The sense of awe that comes from staring up at the towers of glass and metal or the fake canals and lakes between them, much like the manicured islands created to function as sea-level gated communities for the wealthy and famous, comes from the constant sense that everything the eye lands on has been created by human hands. Nothing is organic, and nothing is accidental.

“The emirate’s brand identity is a strange medley of Wall Street and Disneyland,” wrote the Lebanese typographer Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès. Dubai’s dedication to marketing itself is paramount: it is no coincidence that one arm of its government media office is named Brand Dubai.

That the city-state of Dubai is hosting the UN’s Cop28 climate conference rather than the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi, the far larger of the seven emirates that form the UAE, is simply on brand, one that rests on Dubai’s image as a global transport hub and haven of free trade.

While the Emirates’ interventionist and regionally influential foreign policy once prompted former US defence secretary James Mattis to label the country “Little Sparta”, the image of a regional military superpower is more closely tied to Abu Dhabi, which sets the agenda for the Emirates’ domestic and international affairs.

“Dubai has a global profile,” said Kristian Ulrichsen of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.