This introductory chapter offers a short overview of carbon neutrality, the great expectations surrounding its primary beneficiaries, and the macro opportunities and implications it will have, political, economic, and social. It then quickly narrows the focus to the emerging economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, their evolving nature, and the role envisioned for carbon neutrality in their transformation from oil-based to cleaner, knowledge-based economies. Next, the chapter contextualises the challenges facing GCC countries to effectively transition towards carbon neutrality. The gap between the aforementioned interest and potential of carbon neutrality in the region and the scholarly work on the topic is then highlighted, motivating the need for the current volume. The objectives, scope, and expected contributions of the volume are finally presented.

This chapter explores the challenges and options of designing an efficient long-term global climate policy for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The authors start by reviewing the exposure of GCC countries to climate risks and the mitigation and adaptation options at their disposal. It then explores the macroeconomic cost of realising the emissions abatement implied by the Paris Agreement and evaluates the possibility of balancing the burden through an allocation of emissions permits in an international emissions trading system. Focusing on Qatar, the authors then conduct a bottom-up analysis to see how this country could drastically reduce its greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. The authors show how GCC energy policies must be modified to support a global transition towards net zero emissions. In this context, the chapter assesses the comparative advantage of GCC countries in harnessing negative emissions technologies that are necessary to reach the Paris Agreement target.

This concluding chapter presents a high-level overview of the topics and case studies outlined in the earlier chapters, reiterating the main contributions of the book to the literature. The chapter then proceeds with ten takeaways, insights learned, and recommendations derived from the individual chapters. It concludes with a synthesis of the key findings and lessons learned from the various chapters, reflecting on the policy measures, technological innovation, and behavioural change enablers needed for a successful carbon neutrality transition in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

This chapter investigates the premise and potential benefits of green hydrogen (i.e. extracting hydrogen by using energy generated from renewable sources) for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. These countries are currently researching and developing new technologies that will enable them to fulfil their international commitments to reducing carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. The aim of this chapter is to explain how green hydrogen – an energy source that produces environmentally friendly energy – works, the opportunities resulting from its application with regard to net zero emissions, as well as the challenges which may hinder its adoption in the GCC region. In addition to having favourable circumstances for producing green hydrogen, these countries’ vast oil reserves provide the hydrocarbons required to produce this innovative energy source. In this context, the green hydrogen industry’s prospects, constraints, as well as potential impacts on the GCC countries’ ability to meet net zero emissions goals and achieve carbon neutrality are studied.

The chapter overviews the current energy demand trends in the building sector for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region and countries. Specifically, the historical trends of the energy efficiency performance of buildings are discussed. The increasing air-conditioning needs due to the hard climate in the GCC region are highlighted, including the impacts of various space cooling technologies and operation strategies on the energy consumption of buildings in the GCC region. In addition, the chapter discusses the main challenges for improving energy performance and achieving carbon neutrality for the built environment in the GCC countries. Finally, the chapter evaluates potential benefits for large-scale energy efficiency programmes specific to new and existing building stocks within the GCC region. The benefits encompass both cost effectiveness as well as energy productivity metrics accounting for the social, economic, and environmental impacts of various large-scale policy programmes with the aim to improve the energy efficiency and carbon neutrality of building stocks.

This chapter focuses on the global decarbonisation policy gap and the need to account for measurable policies for carbon neutrality, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. One strategy to raise accountability is policy tracking, a technique that has gained traction in empirical policy analysis. The chapter introduces this technique and provides an example of a methodologically rigorous tracking of climate policies in the GCC countries in response to pledges and obligations under the Paris Agreement. This includes government policies, laws, and measures toward the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality targets. We situate our tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discuss its features, and present results on mitigation and energy policy responses to the climate crisis in the Gulf. Key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of measures vary widely across the sample and over time. Necessary macroeconomic, fiscal, technological, and social policy measures also vary greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made. In some GCC countries, policy measures appear to be disproportionate to the challenges linked to both reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Gulf countries’ very own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to varying degrees.