Law No. (11) of 2024
Establishing the Dubai Environment and Climate Change Authority[1]
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
We, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai,
After perusal of:
Federal Law No. (23) of 1999 Concerning Exploitation, Protection, and Development of Living Aquatic Organisms in the United Arab Emirates and its amendments;
Federal Law No. (24) of 1999 Concerning the Protection and Development of the Environment and its amendments;
Federal Decree No. (238) of 2016 Ratifying the Paris Agreement on Climate Change;
Cabinet Resolution No. (37) of 2001 Incorporating Regulations into the Implementing Bylaw of Federal Law No. (24) of 1999 Concerning the Protection and Development of the Environment and its amendments;
Law No. (1) of 2001 Establishing the Ports, Customs, and Free Zone Corporation and its amendments;
Law No. (11) of 2003 Establishing Nature Reserves in the Emirate of Dubai;
Law No. (15) of 2008 Concerning Protection of Groundwater in the Emirate of Dubai;
Law No. (19) of 2009 Establishing the Supreme Council of Energy;
Law No. (8) of 2013 Concerning Human Resource Management of Directors General in the Government of Dubai and its amendments;
Law No. (1) of 2016 Concerning the Financial Regulations of the Government of Dubai, its Implementing Bylaw, and their amendments;
Law No. (8) of 2018 Concerning Management of the Government of Dubai Human Resources;
Law No. (5) of 2021 Concerning the Dubai International Financial Centre;
Law No. (27) of 2021 Concerning the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority;
Law No. (3) of 2023 Concerning the Dubai Maritime Authority;
Law No. (4) of 2023 Concerning the Dubai Ports Authority;
Law No. (16) of 2023 Concerning Urban Planning in the Emirate of Dubai;
Law No. (26) of 2023 Concerning the Executive Council of the Emirate of Dubai;
Decree No. (22) of 2001 Concerning the Conservation of Coastal Areas in the Emirate of Dubai;
Decree No. (22) of 2009 Concerning Special Development Zones in the Emirate of Dubai;
Decree No. (1) of 2019 Regulating the Establishment of Companies by Government Entities in the Emirate of Dubai;
Decree No. (34) of 2022 Establishing the Agencies Affiliated to the Dubai Municipality and Determining their Functions;
Decree No. (60) of 2023 Regulating the Transfer of Employees in the Government of Dubai;
The Order of 1961 Establishing the Dubai Municipality;
The Order Concerning Compliance with Public Health and Safety and Environment Protection in the Emirate of Dubai, issued on 21 January 2004;
Executive Council Resolution No. (19) of 2020 Forming the Dubai Food Security Committee and its amendments;
Executive Council Resolution No. (2) of 2021 Forming the Committee Regulating the Fishing of Living Aquatic Organisms in the Emirate of Dubai;
Executive Council Resolution No. (43) of 2022 Approving the Organisational Structure of the Dubai Municipality;
Local Order No. (61) of 1991 Concerning Environment Protection Systems in the Emirate of Dubai and its Implementing Bylaw;
Local Order No. (8) of 2002 Concerning Sewerage, Irrigation, and Water Drainage in the Emirate of Dubai;
Local Order No. (11) of 2003 Concerning Public Health and Community Safety in the Emirate of Dubai, its Implementing Bylaw, and their amendments; and
The legislation establishing and regulating free zones in the Emirate of Dubai,
Do hereby issue this Law.
©2024 The Supreme Legislation Committee in the Emirate of Dubai
[1]Every effort has been made to produce an accurate and complete English version of this legislation. However, for the purpose of its interpretation and application, reference must be made to the original Arabic text. In case of conflict, the Arabic text will prevail.
This Law will be cited as “Law No. (11) of 2024 Establishing the Dubai Environment and Climate Change Authority”.
The following words and expressions, wherever mentioned in this Law, will have the meaning indicated opposite each of them unless the context implies otherwise:
UAE: | The United Arab Emirates. |
Emirate: | The Emirate of Dubai. |
Ruler: | His Highness the Ruler of Dubai. |
Government: | The Government of Dubai. |
Executive Council: | The Executive Council of the Emirate of Dubai. |
DM: | The Dubai Municipality. |
DECCA: | The Dubai Environment and Climate Change Authority, established pursuant to this Law. |
Director General: | The director general of the DECCA. |
Local Entity: | Any of the Government departments; public agencies and corporations; councils; authorities, including the authorities supervising Special Development Zones and free zones, such as the Dubai International Financial Centre; companies owned by the Government or Government Entities, or in which the Government or Government Entities hold shares; or other entities affiliated to the Government. |
Environment: | The biosphere, where life exists in various forms, comprising Natural Elements and Man-made Elements. |
Natural Elements: | These include all living things, such as humans, animals, plants, and other living organisms; natural resources, such as air, water, soil, and organic and inorganic materials; and natural habitats. |
Man-made Elements: | These include everything introduced by humans into the natural Environment, including fixed and non-fixed structures, such as roads, bridges, airports, and means of transportation, as well as the industries, innovations, and technologies developed in connection with these elements. |
Environment Protection: | Preserving the components, properties, and natural balance of the Environment; preventing, reducing, or controlling pollution; preserving Natural Resources and rationalising their consumption; protecting the organisms living in the Environment, especially endangered species; and developing and improving these components. |
Climate Change: | The long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, whether these shifts are the result of natural or human activities. |
Climate Change Mitigation: | Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases resulting from human activities and causing global warming, which contribute to Climate Change. |
Climate Change Adaptation: | The readiness of establishments, infrastructure systems, economic activities, services, and various facilities, which ensures their resilience against the anticipated risks and negative impacts of Climate Change. |
Steering Committee: | The committee formed pursuant to the provisions of this Law to ensure the smooth transition of functions, powers, responsibilities, budgets, and Employees to the DECCA. |
Pursuant to this Law, a public authority named the “Dubai Environment and Climate Change Authority” is established. The DECCA will have legal personality and the legal capacity required to undertake the acts and dispositions that ensure the achievement of its objectives. The DECCA is hereby affiliated to the Executive Council.
The head office of the DECCA will be located in the Emirate. Branches and offices of the DECCA may be established within and outside of the Emirate pursuant to a resolution of the Executive Council.
The DECCA aims to:
The DECCA is the competent official entity in charge of all matters related to developing, approving, and managing the plans, policies, and strategies related to Climate Change, Environment Protection, and food security within the Emirate, including in Special Development Zones and free zones, such as the Dubai International Financial Centre. In particular, the DECCA will, in coordination with the concerned entities in the Emirate, where applicable, have the duties and powers to:
With the exception of the powers, functions, and responsibilities vested in it in respect of establishing and preparing the policies, legislation, and manuals that fall within its functions under this Law, the DECCA may outsource, in accordance with the legislation in force in the Emirate, any of its powers, functions, and responsibilities under this Law to any public or private entity pursuant to an agreement concluded with that entity in this respect. This agreement will determine the rights and obligations of the DECCA and the contracted entity as well as the conditions, requirements, and specifications that the entity must observe when performing the functions outsourced to it by the DECCA.
The executive body of the DECCA will be comprised of the Director General and a number of administrative, finance, and technical Employees, to whom Law No. (8) of 2018 Concerning Management of the Government of Dubai Human Resources, and the resolutions issued in pursuance thereof, will apply.
The financial resources of the DECCA will consist of:
All Local Entities must fully cooperate with the DECCA; meet its requirements; and provide it with all the data, information, documents, statistics, reports, and studies it requests, particularly any reports on the implementation of the policies and performance indicators approved by the DECCA, to enable it to achieve its objectives and exercise its functions under this Law, the resolutions issued in pursuance hereof, and other legislation in force in the Emirate.
The DECCA, the DM, and the other entities referred to in paragraph (b) of Article (14) hereof must, under the supervision of the Steering Committee, coordinate with the concerned entities in the Emirate to comply with the provisions of this Law within a period not exceeding one (1) Year from the date on which this Law comes into force. The Chairman of the Executive Council may, where required, extend this time frame for the period he deems appropriate.
The Chairman of the Executive Council will issue the resolutions required for the implementation of the provisions of this Law.
Any provision in any other legislation will be repealed to the extent that it contradicts the provisions of this Law.
This Law will be published in the Official Gazette and will come into force on the day on which it is published.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Ruler of Dubai
Issued in Dubai on 25 April 2024
Corresponding to 16 Shawwal 1445 A.H.