With its endless sunshine and sizzling temperatures, the UAE is the perfect place at which to kickback and enjoy an afternoon by the pool.
But a new study suggests that the desire to take a dip consumes significant amounts of water, with more than a billion litres probably evaporating each year from the country’s pools.
While the losses are significant, they are potentially avoidable, because, for any given pool, the researchers said that pool covers could cut evaporation by as much as 95 per cent.
Given the heavy environmental cost of producing desalinated water, they suggested that incentives could be introduced to encourage the use of covers, as is done in some other countries.
Tracking water waste
The new study involved two scientists from the UK's Loughborough University, calculating water losses from swimming pools in the Palm Jumeirah development. Specialist mapping software was used to identify swimming pools on the development and to calculate their total area.
This calculated that there are 1,859 “water bodies” – typically swimming pools – on the Palm Jumeirah with a total area of 173,500 square metres. From this, the researchers used established formulas to determine how much water is lost each year.
In Palm Jumeirah alone, this works out at an average of 603.1 million litres lost each year between 2010 and 2020. This, the new study reported, is equivalent to the annual water use of around 3,000 people, which is about one third of the development’s population.
“If the present study was upscaled from the Palm Jumeirah to all of the UAE, the water saving could amount to billions of litres per year (even with a moderate assumption of twice as many pools),” the researchers wrote.
If the whole of the UAE had twice as many pools as the Palm Jumeirah does – a very conservative estimate – then water losses from evaporation would be well in excess of one billion litres per year.
The new study, “Evaporation losses from residential swimming pools and water features under climate variability and change,” is published in The Geographical Journal.
While they are in use, solid pool covers – common types include foam covers, bubble covers and solid track covers) – cut losses from evaporation by about 95 per cent.
If such covers had been deployed on all pools for 22 hours a day – leaving two hours for swimming, then the 603.1 million litre annual loss would have been cut by 524.6 million litres a year. This is an 87 per cent reduction.
Could financial incentives be the key?
The first author of the study, Alicia Cumberland, a postgraduate student in the university’s Department of Geography and Environment, said that in some other parts of the world, such as Victoria in Australia and Southern Nevada, the authorities have provided financial incentives to encourage residents to install pool covers to reduce water loss. She said that similar measures could be considered in the UAE.
“I think it would be very beneficial if they included policies where if you’re not using your swimming pool, pool covers are mandated and they’ll provide subsidies. It would go a long way to helping people save water and energy bills,” she said.
Another measure, she said, could be for new developments to install communal pools that could be used by residents from a number of properties, instead of providing every home with its own pool.
The amount of water used in the UAE, at around 550 litres per person per day, according to figures from the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment, is one of the highest in the world.
According to previous research, 63 per cent of Dubai’s water consumption is accounted for by residential use, which in 2023 accounted for 380 billion litres.
Much of the water provided to households has been produced through desalination, an energy-intensive process that generates carbon emissions, so reducing water use offers environmental benefits.
Tracing water footprints
The other author of the study, Prof Rob Wilby, professor of hydroclimatic modelling in the Department of Geography and Environment, said that while people were becoming more accustomed to thinking about their personal and household carbon footprints, “just as much attention is needed to our water footprints”.
“In the case of pools, we can reduce both carbon emissions and evaporated water by using covers,” he said. “This way, less energy is needed to treat and pump the smaller amounts of water for topping up the pool. This win-win is especially important for hot and arid parts of the world like the UAE.”
Various types of pool cover are available, Ms Cumberland said, among them foam covers, bubble covers and solid track covers, the last of which are controlled automatically. Variation between them in terms of the amount of water saved is modest, ranging between 94 and 96 per cent.
Chemical suppressants can be added to pools to reduce water loss, but these are likely to reduce evaporation by only about 14 or 15 per cent, Ms Cumberland said.
One uncertainty in the latest research, the authors said, was the extent to which pool covers are currently being used, with the figures calculated on the basis that all pools are kept uncovered.
A key focus of the study was understanding how evaporative losses from pools may change as a result of climate change.
The researchers calculated that current losses from pools on Palm Jumeirah, of about 600 million litres a year, could rise to as much as 675 million litres annually by 2050.
