This session draws on the Steel Status Report 2026 UAE findings. The UAE scores among the highest in the region on sovereign financing and export positioning: the UAE's steel ecosystem combines state-linked ownership and private capital-markets discipline with early moves on clean-energy procurement and carbon capture, positioning it among the region's more commercially legible low-carbon steel platforms.

The Carboun Institute is convening a closed-door session together with the Alliance for Industrial Decarbonisation (AFID), to ask whether the UAE's steel sector is moving from pilot to volume across both routes, and what's needed to scale them further, against a backdrop of recent geopolitical disruption to iron ore and export shipping routes, and more persistent, systemic barriers to scale. Participants' perspectives will feed directly into a cross-country synthesis and into how Carboun Institute shapes its steel-sector work for 2027.