The Future of Building Isn't Just Green, It's Healthy

Few countries have demonstrated the kind of sustained commitment to sustainable construction that the UAE has built over the past two decades. As early as 2007, Dubai issued a landmark decree requiring all buildings to conform to green building standards, a commitment that became mandatory for all new developments by 2014. Today, 72,000 buildings in the emirate comply, accounting for 57% of all buildings in Dubai. 

The country was the first in the MENA region to ratify the Paris Agreement, the first to commit to net zero by 2050, and its green buildings market, currently valued at $7.1 billion, is projected to nearly double to $13.1 billion by 2032. This is not incidental progress. It is the result of deliberate, forward-looking leadership that the rest of the world has watched and, in many cases, followed.

It is precisely because that foundation is so strong that the next question worth asking is: what does a green building actually do for the person living inside it?

Green building was not the end of the story. It was a chapter in it. Every standard the construction industry has ever adopted whether structural, fire, energy, or environmental  was once considered advanced thinking before it became baseline expectation. Green is now baseline. According to statistics, the clear new industry focus is building for the health of the person inside, with the same rigour and measurability that green brought to the world outside. 

GWI research shows that the number of certified healthy buildings has increased 24x in the Middle East between 2021 and 2023. ADNOC, Mubadala, Nakheel, Emaar, Majid, and Al Futtaim have all enrolled dozens of healthy building certified assets. With 23 certified healthy buildings, Dubai Expo City was the first community in the region to enroll for a district scale program of healthy building certification.

The difference lives in the materials chosen, the systems designed, and the environment created within every room, every hour of every day. Some of that environment is noticeable: the air quality, the temperature, the light. Some of it is not. 

Every modern building produces a continuous electromagnetic environment from the wiring inside its walls, the Wi-Fi networks broadcasting through every surface, the 5G signals penetrating from outside. All that operates around the clock, whether the building is full or empty, whether its occupants are awake or asleep. For years, this was the dimension of the indoor environment that the industry had not yet found the tools to address. That is changing. The most forward-looking developers, and increasingly the most discerning buyers, are beginning to ask questions about electromagnetic exposure that simply were not on any development brief five years ago. It is becoming the next frontier of what serious building looks like. A healthy building does not only reduce a structure's impact on the world outside. It actively supports the health of the people within it, across every dimension of the environment they inhabit. That is what it means to move from treating illness to preventing it.

The market has already reached this conclusion. According to the America at Home Study, 60% of people now cite health and wellness as the primary reason they desire certain features in a home, up 17 percentage points from two years prior. The Global Wellness Institute puts the wellness real estate market at $548 billion, forecasting it will cross $1.1 trillion by 2029, making it the fastest-growing sector in the global wellness economy. The Middle East and North Africa region is among the fastest-growing globally, with a 22.6% annual growth rate from 2019 to 2024. Today’s buyers are not asking whether a building is only energy efficient. They are asking whether it will actively support their long-term health and protect their family within it.

One of the most significant and underaddressed dimensions of that indoor environment is electromagnetic pollution, because it used to be the most misunderstood until recently. The WHO classifies radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic. A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Health in March 2026, drawing on data from the $30 million US National Toxicology Program, concluded that current wireless radiation exposure limits are at least 200 times too high to protect against cancer risk, and 24 times too high to protect against reproductive harm. These are not distant or hypothetical risks. They describe the environment inside every home, school, and workplace being built today across the world.

Europe has begun to act. France has banned Wi-Fi in daycare centres. Switzerland has written precautionary electromagnetic limits for schools and hospitals into national law. The European Parliament has concluded that commonly used radiofrequency radiation is probably carcinogenic and may affect fertility and fetal development. The direction of travel is clear.

I have spent several years working alongside developers in Europe and beyond who have begun asking exactly this question at the design phase. EMFIS is currently among the few organisations in the world dedicated to measuring, certifying, and managing electromagnetic exposure within buildings, a gap that explains why the healthy building standard has taken this long to emerge, and why the solutions, until now, have been absent from every development brief. The answer does not require a retreat from connectivity. Smart buildings can remain smart. The goal is intelligent design that delivers the benefits of modern infrastructure while actively managing the electromagnetic environment within it. 

Projects we have worked on, including developments here in the UAE, have achieved up to 98.7% reduction in low-frequency electric fields and 81.8% reduction in high-frequency electromagnetic fields, verified through independent third-party testing, without compromising a single connected system. When integrated at the design phase, the cost premium is between 0.6% and 1.6% of total build cost. For that, a developer future-proofs every square metre of a building against the most rapidly evolving health risk in the modern indoor environment. Longevity and connectivity are not in conflict. They simply require the same design-phase intention that the UAE already brings to energy and water.

(The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of Real Estate Market Times.)