Sustainable digital governance in the GCC: Greener digital communication

Sustainability in the GCC is about targets, efficiency, and trust

The region’s sustainability agenda is ambitious, and it is increasingly tied to national transformation programmes.

• The UAE has formalised its Net Zero 2050 direction through the official Net Zero 2050 Strategy and related pathways.

• Saudi Arabia has publicly committed to net zero by 2060, framed through national initiatives such as the Saudi Green Initiative.

• Qatar’s updated NDC sets out an economy-wide ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030 relative to a business-as-usual scenario.

In practice, these targets place pressure on every part of government operations, including the “boring” plumbing: notification flows, document delivery, evidence of notice, and authenticated two-way communication. That is where digital trust and sustainability overlap. When people trust digital channels, adoption goes up. When adoption goes up, paper and manual handling go down. When delivery is reliable, organisations reduce follow ups, resends, and duplicated processes.

Paperless policy is only the starting point

Across the GCC, paperless government has become a policy direction, not a pilot. The UAE is a clear reference case for what can be achieved at scale, where Dubai’s paperless programme has been reported to deliver large reductions in paper use alongside significant savings in time and cost.

The policy question now is not whether paperless works. It is what needs to be in place for paperless delivery to remain stable over time, across agencies, and across all message types, including the ones with legal and operational consequences.

That is where many digitisation programmes hit a familiar constraint: the hardest communications to remove from paper are the ones that require certainty. Notices that trigger deadlines, payments, enforcement actions, entitlement decisions, and regulated statements often stay fragmented across portals, e-mail, and departmental systems, because it is difficult to standardise delivery evidence, identity assurance, and retention rules across a patchwork of channels.

From a sustainability perspective, this matters because fragmentation creates avoidable “operational waste” that policy programmes rarely measure directly. It shows up as repeat sending, duplicated document handling, manual dispute resolution, and continued print exceptions. A governed Digital Postbox helps address this by providing a single delivery layer with consistent rules and evidence, so paperless can extend confidently into high consequence communication without needing parallel fallbacks.

For a deeper look at how secure communication supports sustainability programmes across the GCC, download our report, Building the Trusted Digital Nation: Secure Communication as a Cornerstone of the GCC Digital Future.

The hidden sustainability issue: digital overhead is growing too

There is another reason the delivery layer matters: digital infrastructure has a real footprint, and demand is accelerating.

The IEA has highlighted that data centres’ electricity consumption was about 460 TWh in 2022, and demand could more than double by 2026 depending on growth in AI and digital services.

For governments, that does not mean “go back to paper”. It means design digital services to be efficient and consolidated. Every extra portal, inbox, and duplicated document journey has a cost in compute, storage, and operations. A single, governed delivery channel can reduce that duplication by creating one trusted place for official documents, notices, and authenticated responses.

This is where sustainability becomes about architecture. Not just replacing paper, but reducing the number of parallel systems doing the same job.

Why trusted delivery supports sustainability in practice

A national Digital Postbox model is best understood as part of digital infrastructure. It is the layer that ensures official communication is delivered in a way that is consistent, auditable, and trusted.

From a sustainability perspective, the mechanism is simple:

1. Trust increases adoption. People are more willing to go fully digital when they know where official messages arrive and how to verify them.

2. Adoption reduces printing and manual handling. Fewer edge cases, fewer “just in case” letters, fewer counter visits.

3. Governance reduces operational waste. Clear evidence of delivery reduces disputes, follow ups, and duplicated processing.

4. Consolidation reduces duplication. One channel reduces the need for multiple departmental delivery stacks.

There is a strong link between secure digital delivery and reduced administrative friction, stronger efficiency and better sustainability outcomes, ultimately making digital delivery more efficient than paper or fragmented systems.

A well designed Digital Postbox delivery layer typically includes:

• verified sender and recipient identity

• edge-to-edge encryption for sensitive content

• proof of delivery and time stamping

• auditability and retention controls

• clear rules for what qualifies as official notice

Those are security features, but they also drive sustainability because they reduce failure demand: the extra work created when a process does not deliver a clear outcome the first time.

How this connects to UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman

These national programmes are already aligned around modern, citizen centric digitisation, but with different emphasis areas, from digital trust and secure delivery to digital sovereignty and governed official communication.

UAE

The UAE’s national net zero direction is clear, and so is the drive to modernise government interactions.

The UAE Digital Government Strategy 2025 sets the goal of reinforcing citizen confidence through secure, paperless interaction. A Digital Postbox supports that by making the “where does the official message arrive” question unambiguous, which reduces confusion, fraud risk, and follow up overhead.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 digital programmes are framed around scale, interoperability, and citizen experience, with a strong focus on identity and privacy as national assets. At the same time, Saudi’s net zero ambition by 2060 puts pressure on operational efficiency across government. A governed delivery layer is a practical way to reduce duplication across agencies while strengthening trust in official digital channels.

Qatar

Qatar’s NDC includes the 25% by 2030 ambition, and official materials describe the role of energy efficiency across sectors in achieving it.

The TASMU Smart Nation includes the vision of a fully connected society where people and institutions interact safely through intelligent, secure systems. A Digital Postbox fits naturally into that “safe interaction” layer by providing a single trusted channel for high consequence communications.

Oman

Oman is a useful example of how sustainability, trust, and sovereignty can be designed in from the start. Oman Post’s partnership with e-Boks aims to establish an official national Digital Postbox for secure communication between government, businesses, and individuals. As the service is developed and introduced, the sustainability benefit is not only paper reduction. It is also fewer fragmented journeys, fewer resends, and fewer manual exceptions because the official channel is clear and verified.

A simple checklist for a more sustainable communication layer

To evaluate an official digital communication in a sustainable way, this is a practical starting point:

• Define which messages must be “official” (deadlines, payments, permits, enforcement, identity sensitive documents)

• Standardise delivery rules across agencies so citizens do not have to guess where to look

• Use verified identity and secure delivery by default for high consequence communication

• Build in evidence (proof of delivery, time stamps, audit trails) to reduce disputes and manual handling

• Measure failure demand (resends, follow ups, call centre volume, missed deadlines) and treat it as waste to be designed out

• Consolidate where possible to reduce duplicated portals and parallel delivery systems

Closing thought

Paperless programmes prove that the GCC can move fast. The next sustainability gains come from making digital government not only online, but also trusted and operationally efficient at the point where official decisions are communicated.

A national Digital Postbox is one of the clearest ways to achieve that, because it turns secure communication into shared infrastructure rather than a patchwork of channels.