How Tatiana Antonelli Abella Built a Sustainability Business in a Market That Didn't Want One

For the first six years, nobody paid her.

That is the detail Tatiana Antonelli Abella, Founder and Managing Director of Goumbook, returns to when asked what the hard part was. Not the science, not the logistics of planting trees in a desert, not the regulatory grey zone she operated in. The hard part was that in 2009, in a country building itself at record speed, almost nobody in the UAE wanted to buy what she was selling — which was, essentially, a change of mind.

"It was really, really hard to talk to entities and have them fund what we were doing," she says. "They didn't see the return on investment, let's put it that way."

Seventeen years later, Goumbook is the sustainability partner behind Dubai Can, holds a Social Enterprise Seal from Abu Dhabi, and runs regional initiatives spanning oceans, agriculture, air quality and youth across MENA. The through-line from the volunteer years to now is a single insight that most sustainability ventures in this region got wrong: the story being told was the wrong story.

The Western script didn't work here

The idea began in 2008. Abella had moved to the UAE in 2005, spoke several languages, and had been supporting embassies with business meetings — a vantage point that gave her unusual visibility into who was arriving and what they were building. Then she had her second son.

"Suddenly I started thinking about my children and thinking, what food am I giving to them? What are the products I'm using on their skin?"

Her research turned up plenty — in Europe and the US. Locally, nothing. A friend told her to build a website. She did, along with a business directory for the handful of companies importing eco-friendly products into the country.

It failed. "Nobody was visiting it. There was really no interest."

The diagnosis took a while to arrive, and when it did it reframed everything. "The whole narrative about being eco-friendly and looking at nature was very Western. It was all about saving the trees and saving the polar bear, and don't heat your homes. Here it's about cooling your homes. It's about water consumption. It's about the desert and the sea."

Worse, the local assumption was that there was nothing here worth protecting. "Many of us think that this region is about sand — an empty quarter of nothing to protect and nothing to take care of."

That was the tipping point: treating the desert and the sea as fragile ecosystems rather than empty space. And rather than lecture people on ten issues, Abella picked one.

The tree was the Trojan horse

The WWF, with Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, had recently run a campaign around the Ghaf, newly declared the UAE's national tree and a protected species. Goumbook took the concept and inverted it — from saving Ghaf trees to planting them, at scale, with people's hands in the soil.

The tree was never really the point. "You feel the soil, you feel the sun, and suddenly you're in a different spot," she says. "Ideally, you would come to plant a tree. We would plant that seed in your mind about the why behind planting the tree."

The why was arithmetic. Ornamental trees across the region's urban landscaping can consume up to 300 litres per tree per day. Local species need a fraction of that. And the water itself comes from desalination — energy-intensive, with meaningful consequences for marine ecosystems. "Does it make sense to burn so much energy and use so many resources to actually then irrigate the wrong tree?"

That framing let her sidestep the guilt reflex that kills most environmental messaging. "It's not about depressing people with heavy facts and sad images. It's more about: yes, we have a problem, but hey, we have a solution. It's available here."

Notably, Abella refuses to compete on the metric her sector loves most. "For us, the numbers are a bit tricky. We are not looking at planting millions of trees. You will hear many times across the region very big programmes planting millions of trees, and honestly, I still need to understand the real environmental impact of planting so many trees."

Private sector first, government second

The unlock came from an unexpected direction. After a first write-up in The National, the inbox filled — not with readers, but with companies. "We received so many emails, so many phone calls of companies saying, we wanna help. What can we do to help you do the right thing?"

One of them, Al Barari, opened its nurseries. Goumbook grew hundreds of thousands of Ghaf saplings there, in kind. "Without that, we would have never been able to actually go into the full-fledged Give a Ghaf tree-planting programme."

Government followed, first municipalities, then ministries. The proof point arrived with Dubai Can, when Dubai Economy and Tourism backed the installation of more than 50 public drinking fountains across the city in a matter of months, with Goumbook handling awareness and education. "When there is a vision, when there is a goal, and we share values" — that, she says, is how fast things can move here.

The category problem that hasn't gone away

The structural challenge was never solved by scale. In the early years, permits for charities and NGOs were scarce, and the social enterprise model simply had no local precedent. "Who am I? Am I a regular business? No. Am I a private entity? Yes. Do I still ask my clients to pay for my services? Yes. I'm not doing charity."

The bias persists. Teaching a master's class on social entrepreneurship in Dubai last year, Abella noticed her students had checked out. She stopped and asked them to define a social enterprise in one word.

"All of them said charity, or it doesn't make any money. It's not a business."

Her counter-example is closer to home than Patagonia: Emirates Global Aluminium, a heavy industry player now supplying recycled aluminium to customers including BMW. "These are things that 20 years ago we would have never even been dreaming about, and it's actually happening and it's here."

The end state she wants is one where the label becomes redundant. "Ideally, you want a world where all businesses are purpose-led."

On AI: the resource question nobody wants

Ask her about technology and the pitch softens into something warier. Abella isn't anti-AI — Goumbook's entire model runs on surfacing available tech solutions — but the resource maths concerns her, particularly water consumption by data centres in a region already dependent on desalination.

"There's no AI without humans, so we need to make sure that humans and humanity is considered as a priority. We need to see AI as an incredible, amazing tool, but it cannot become our master, because that's where the problem is."

The next five years are about deepening education across MENA and going harder at air quality — specifically indoors. "We spend almost 90% of our time in the office, at home, at the gym. That's the air that needs to be clean."

The bigger thesis is that the Gulf has been running a climate experiment the rest of the world is only now enrolling in. As Europe posts record temperatures and Italian streets soften underfoot, Abella points to cities built for 50°C, corals that thrive at 38°C water temperatures where European reefs die at 32, and species that stay green through a Gulf summer.

"This region has known this climate and is ahead. That's a really important contribution that can be made to the rest of the world."