For the islands in Lebanon see Palm Islands Nature Reserve

Palm Islands are two artificial islands, Palm Jumeirah and Palm Jebel Ali, on the coast of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. As at November 2014, only Palm Jumeirah has been completed. This island takes the form of a palm tree, topped by a crescent. When complete, Palm Jebel Ali will take a similar shape; both islands will be host to a large number of residential, leisure and entertainment centres and will add a total of 520kilometres of non-public beaches to the city of Dubai. The creation of the Palm Jumeirah began in June 2001. Shortly after, the Palm Jebel Ali was announced and reclamation work began. A third island was planned and construction started, but this project was later remodelled and renamed to Deira Island.

The Palm Islands are artificial islands constructed from sand dredged from the bottom of the Persian Gulf by the Belgian company, Jan De Nul and the Dutch company, Van Oord. The sand is sprayed from dredging ships, guided by a Global Positioning System, onto the required area. The spraying process is known as rainbowing because of the rainbow-like arcs produced in the air when the sand is sprayed. The outer edge of each palm's encircling crescent is a large rock breakwater. The breakwater of the Palm Jumeirah contains over seven million tons of rock; each rock was placed individually by a crane, its position signed off by a diver, and given a Global Positioning System coordinate.[citation needed]

The Jan De Nul Group started working on the Palm Jebel Ali in 2001 and had finished by the end of 2006. The reclamation project for the Palm Jebel Ali includes the creation of a four-kilometer-long peninsula, protected by a 200-meter-wide, seventeen-kilometer long circular breakwater. There are 210,000,000cubic meters of rock, sand and limestone that were reclaimed (partly originating from the Jebel Ali entrance channel dredging work). There are approximately 10,000,000cubic meters of rocks in the Slope Protection Works.

The Palm Jumeirah ( Coordinates: 250628N 550815E / 25.10778N 55.13750E / 25.10778; 55.13750 ) consists of a tree trunk, a crown with 16 fronds, and a surrounding crescent island that forms an 11kilometer-long breakwater. The island itself is five kilometers by five kilometers. It adds 78kilometers to the Dubai coastline.

Residents began moving into Palm Jumeirah properties at the end of 2006, five years after land reclamation began.

A Monorail opened in 2009, but is not connected to other public transport.

The Palm Jebel Ali began construction in October 2002 and was expected to be completed in mid-2008.[1][2]

The construction of the Palm Islands has had a significant impact on the surrounding environment, resulting in changes to area wildlife, coastal erosion, alongshore sediment transport and wave patterns. Sediment stirred up by construction has suffocated and injured local marine fauna and reduced the amount of sunlight which filters down to seashore vegetation. Variations in alongshore sediment transport have resulted in changes in erosion patterns along the UAE coast, which has also been exacerbated by altered wave patterns as the waters of the Gulf attempt to move around the new obstruction of the islands. [3][4]

Dubai's megaprojects have become a favorite cause of environmentalists. Greenpeace has criticized the Palm Islands for lack of sustainability, and Mongabay.com, a site dedicated to rain forest conservation, has attacked Dubai's artificial islands aggressively, stating that:

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