The latest addition to my website is my work from 3 trips out to the UAE’s Western Region this winter. As well as looking at issues of land use and sustainability, I also embarked on a new project featuring specifically the Sabkha landscape. Sabkha means ‘salt plain’ in Arabic, and the Sabkha of the UAE is arguably the world’s most distinct example of this type of landscape.

At first sight, the Sabkha seems like a barren, featureless wasteland, devoid of topographic or biotic features. But closer examination reveals an infinite variety of surface texture and colour, and a little research illuminates many fascinating and complex variants of geological, chemical and algal factors that have created this subtle palette.

Spending time in the Sabkha also leads one to question the way we perceive and consequently value natural landscapes. Much of the Sabkha landscape is now pock-marked with industrial activity and infrastructure development, such as roads, pipelines, pylons, railways, dykes and gullies. The physical actions, such as periodic flooding, that created this unique landscape are being terminally interrupted by catastrophic topographical alteration. The obvious question people might ask is ‘does it matter?’

Recent research has shown that certain Halophytes (salt tolerant plants) have tremendous potential as both food and biofuel crops and could feasibly be farmed on salt water-irrigated tidal flats. And the distinctive cyano-bacterial mats that form on the coastal strips of the Sabkha offer, as yet, untold potential in the fields of human health, global ecology, energy-production and more. But who’s to say if the potential of the Sabkha ends with these two acknowledged qualities? Or, indeed, whether we should indulge in the valuation of natural landscape in this way, at all?