Neom
Neom's flagship city, known as The Line, has grand plans to be a futuristic "eco-city."
Officials say the linear city will be built between two giant mirrored skyscrapers, each 1640 feet high and 656 feet apart, and be free of roads, cars, and emissions.
While plans for The Line have baffled architects and designers, Saudi has continually touted the project as one of the most sustainable in the world.
It's part of Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 plan to reorient the country's economy away from fossil fuels, which are the source of its wealth, toward innovation, technology, and tourism.
Even the unusual materials used for The Line aim to foster a sense of coexistence with the natural world.
"With a mirrored facade, wherever you are looking you will see the land behind you, which will be a natural environment. It will blend in perfectly with the surrounding environment. The Line becomes part of its environment, at one with nature," Giles Pendleton, Neom's chief operating officer, said in a press release.
But recent reports have raised questions about how sustainable the city really is.
A May report from The Wall Street Journal said that Neom officials were recently seeking out contractors to build two gas power plants to power the region until greener energy could be sourced.
In the same month, Neom also axed a $1.5 billion project to build a water desalination plant for the city that ran on 100% renewable energy. The exact reason for the cancellation is still unclear.
Experts told Business Insider that while The Line's eco ambitions were visionary, issues with its construction and design could undermine some of the Kingdom's sustainability goals.
Initial designs for The Line have already faced criticism about their potential impact on wildlife and everyday appeal.
The mirrored structure is set to be built on a migration route used by billions of birds, something that has reportedly left planners concerned the city could lure a "significant number" of them to their deaths.
In documents reviewed by The Journal, designers wrote that it was "inevitable that a significant number of birds will perish," illustrating their concerns with a drawing of a dead northern flicker.
Anirban Adhya, a professor of architecture and urban design at Lawrence Technological University, told Business Insider that the city's design could harm the surrounding environment.
"The development seems to be very uniform with external mirrors on both sides," he said. "This could be harmful ecologically in terms of unnecessary heat gain as well as detrimental for birds and their flying path."
Whether the construction of the "eco-city" is as sustainable as the finished project is another question.
"The energy that's going to be used to build it is not going to be sustainable — even if once Neom is built, it might have a sustainable component," Andreas Krieg, a Gulf specialist at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King's College London, told BI.
Philip Oldfield, head of school at UNSW Built Environment in Sydney, has estimated that building The Line would produce billions of tons of embodied carbon dioxide.
He said after calculating the amount of floor area, how big it will be, and how much concrete it might need the amount of carbon produced could be equivalent to the UK's total emission over three to four years.
Neom claims that 95% of land and sea in the region will be protected for nature and is already recruiting for roles dedicated to rewilding and land preservation.
It has also promised to be a zero-carbon city, relying on public transport instead of cars and roads.
Experts told BI that these plans offered exciting solutions for issues like urban sprawl, excessive carbon emissions, and inefficient energy use.
Even just the focus on AI-enhanced sustainability was an important step in pushing the boundaries of urban design, said Mona Lovgreen, a partner and architect at design company Dialog.
However, its construction did pose some potential negative ecological impacts, she said.
Lovgreen pointed to issues "such as disrupting natural habitats, carbon emissions from building materials, and the transferring of these materials to areas remote from where they are produced."
Mara Baum, an architect and sustainability expert also at Dialog, added that while Neom's effort to reduce transport emissions was important, "this ignores the substantial environmental impact of building a new city from scratch."
"Transportation accounts for less than a quarter of global carbon emissions, while the construction and operation of buildings represent nearly 40% of emissions," Baum said.
She added that it can be particularly difficult to maintain sustainable construction in hot and dry regions of the world.
Saudi's green ambitions for Neom also serve to redirect attention away from the country's heavy reliance on oil and gas.
While megaprojects like Neom are part of a plan to pivot Saudi's economy away from fossil fuels, the projects are still largely funded by the country's vast oil revenues.
Krieg said projects like Neom were part of a wider greenwashing trend across Gulf nations.
"These countries don't talk about oil and gas," he said. "For Neom and all these bigger projects, part of the PR of it is saying that it's going to be green and it's going to be sustainable."
"These little efforts that they're making are supposed to compensate for the massive percentage of dirty energy that they're producing," he said.
Representatives for Neom did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
With additional reporting from Ben Bauer.
