Water is the input that Gulf economies can least afford to get wrong, and the numbers explain why. The UAE currently draws roughly 42% of its drinking water from desalination, with installed capacity of more than 7 million cubic metres a day. Across the wider Gulf, six countries together produce around 40% of the world's desalinated water through more than 400 plants — a response to some of the lowest per-capita renewable freshwater levels anywhere on earth.
That dependence is only deepening. Regional desalination capacity is projected to keep expanding significantly over the rest of this decade, and Dubai's own utility is expanding water storage capacity by more than a fifth by 2030. The UAE's Water Security Strategy 2036 sets an explicit target of cutting the CO2 associated with desalination by 100 million metric tons — a sign that the next phase of investment is less about building capacity from scratch and more about making existing capacity cleaner and more efficient.
“For a long-term holder of capital, that combination — a resource with structurally rising demand, and infrastructure with multi-decade operating lives — is a rare one.”
That shift is exactly where we see the opportunity. The first wave of Gulf desalination investment was about solving a supply problem: build enough plants to meet demand. The next wave is about solving an efficiency and resilience problem — lower-carbon desalination processes, better brine management, smarter distribution networks that reduce loss, and reuse systems that stretch every cubic metre further.
Infrastructure like this doesn't behave like most other asset classes. Water treatment and distribution networks are built to run for decades under contracted or regulated revenue, largely insulated from the demand cycles that affect more discretionary sectors. For a long-term holder of capital, that combination — a resource with structurally rising demand, and infrastructure with multi-decade operating lives — is a rare one. It's why water and resources sits alongside energy as one of the sectors we expect to hold positions in longest.