Municipality presents paper on Dubai coast

Dubai Municipality has presented a paper on the Coastal Zone Monitoring Programme along Dubai coast in the Environment Conference 2009, which was held recently in the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre under the theme "Towards a Sustainable Coastal Environment".

The paper entitled "An innovative approach for monitoring and managing dynamic Dubai coastal zone", was prepared by Alya Al Harmoudi, Head of Coastal Zone and Waterways Management Section at the Environment Department.

It showcased the emirate's experience in this field and explored the ways of activating the methodology of integrated management of coastal zone through legislation and regulatory undertaken along the environmentally-sensitive areas. There also is a regulatory unit, which undertakes all tasks and responsibilities for monitoring and studying the coastal phenomenon and their impact on the marine environment.

The paper focused on the Integrated Coastal Zone Management approach, which is based on a sound understanding of prevailing coastal processes for managing the Dubai coastline, which is subjected to massive development pressure coupled with extensive natural resource utilisation.

The most important strategic initiative for effective management of the Dubai coastal zone was identified to be the implementation of a coastal zone monitoring programme. The initial emphasis of the programme was primarily data collection and establishment of marine survey capability. Subsequently, it shifted focus to data analysis, products and interfacing with DM-operated predictive numerical models. The outcomes of this carefully designed phase sequence would eventually be translated to strategic planning directives and development of legislations to preserve and ensure sustainable development of Dubai's coast.

In addition to the above, the section is undertaking an initiative to monitor the coastal zone through video cameras as three video cameras, mounted on the rooftop of the Burj Al Arab hotel, have been installed to capture time-lapse imagery of beaches.

The building housing the cameras is located offshore, allowing the cameras to capture a full view of the beach from offshore, rather than the usual onshore seaward-directed view captured by most such systems. As a complement to this effort an expanded network of cameras is now to be installed along the Dubai coast.

The captured data, Alya added, are presently stored on a server at the Dubai Municipality and workstations running ArcMap GIS is used as principal data management application.

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