Year: 2026 | Month: April | Volume: 13 | Issue: 4 | Pages: 697-715
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260470
From COP Commitments to Environmental Ethics: A Comprehensive Review of Decarbonization Pathways for the UAE Built Environment
Nasruddin1, Abdul Hari Panai2, Sukirman Rahim3, Marni Susanti Hamidun4
1Doctoral Program in Environmental Science, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
2,3,4Postgraduate Program, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
Corresponding Author: Nasruddin
ABSTRACT
The decarbonization of the built environment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has moved from a narrow energy-efficiency agenda to a broader socio-technical transformation challenge that includes operational carbon, embodied carbon, water stress, climate adaptation, urban governance, and environmental ethics. Building on the legacy contribution of Locke et al. (2023) and confined strictly to the user-supplied evidence base, this review synthesizes the attached extraction set to update the state of knowledge on UAE-relevant decarbonization strategies after COP26 and COP27. The review adopts a structured narrative synthesis of the supplied literature and organizes the evidence into five connected domains: climate governance and ethical justification; passive and envelope-led operational carbon reduction; life-cycle and circular material strategies; water-energy-material nexus innovations; and social, behavioral, and justice-oriented dimensions of climate-resilient urbanism. Across the literature, the strongest message is that no single technology can deliver deep decarbonization in hot-arid urban contexts. Instead, durable progress depends on combining passive cooling, stricter and harmonized codes, urban-scale energy modeling, renewable integration, life-cycle thinking, atmospheric and desalination-linked water strategies, and occupant-centered governance. The review argues that environmental ethics should become an explicit design principle rather than an implicit background concern, because decisions on comfort, water, material intensity, digitalization, and adaptive capacity are inherently distributive and intergenerational. A UAE-specific integrative framework is proposed to connect policy ambition, urban form, building design, infrastructure, and community action. The article concludes by outlining a next-generation research agenda for net-zero and climate-resilient urban development in the UAE and similar Gulf settings.
Keywords: UAE built environment; decarbonization; environmental ethics; passive design; embodied carbon; water-energy-material nexus; climate resilience
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