By Federico Marangoni, Founder & CEO, EMFIS®

When Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan declared 2026 the Year of the Family, he did not speak in generalities. He declared that the growth of Emirati families lies at the heart of the country's identity, continuity, and national security, and that it is a shared responsibility that belongs to every sector, every institution, and every individual who calls the UAE home. Under the tagline "Growing in Unity," that call extends to healthcare, education, housing, the economy, and the built environment where family life actually happens. For families raising children, the quality of that environment increasingly includes concern for electromagnetic pollution, an invisible layer of indoor pollution present in homes, schools, and places where children grow, sleep, and learn.

The UAE has built one of the most connected, most forward-looking societies on earth - smart cities, world-class infrastructure, and a commitment to quality of life that makes it one of the most sought-after places in the world to raise a family. That connectivity is not incidental to family life here. It is woven into it. It is in the hospitals where they are born, the homes where they sleep, the nurseries where they take their first steps into the world, and the schools where they learn. This year, the UAE Federal Decree-Law on child digital safety came into force - restricting harmful content, introducing age verification, and shielding children from threats they cannot see. It was visionary leadership, and I applaud it without reservation. But I want to extend its logic. The UAE has now acted to protect what children see on their screens. The next question is what those screens, and the invisible infrastructure powering them, are doing to the physical spaces where entire communities spend their days.

Because this is not only a conversation about children. It is a conversation about the teacher in that same classroom for 8 hours a day, the nurse on the maternity ward, the parent working from home, and the family sleeping under a roof threaded with electrical wiring that runs whether devices are on or off. Every school, every hospital, every home, and every workplace in the UAE has become a dense node in an electromagnetic network - 5G penetrating from outside, Wi-Fi broadcasting through every wall, smart systems running day and night. The entire fabric of daily life is embedded in this invisible landscape, and almost no one is measuring it.

Regulatory limits for electromagnetic exposure exist here, as they do across the world - and that is a good thing. But a baseline limit is not the same as the protection people reasonably expect in the places where they spend more than eight hours a day and where their bodies are biologically set to recover: the classroom, the hospital ward, the office, and above all the bedroom. In those spaces, a higher standard is not a luxury. It is foundational hygiene, and it matters most for children whose developing bodies are the most vulnerable to sustained exposure.

Europe has already begun to act on this distinction. The World Health Organization classifies radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic. France has banned Wi-Fi in daycare centres making Paris one of the most protected cities in the world, and Brussels is following in these footsteps. Switzerland has written precautionary EMF limits for schools, hospitals, and kindergartens into national law. The European Parliament has concluded that commonly used radiofrequency radiation is probably carcinogenic and may affect fertility and fetal development. These are not fringe positions. They are the considered responses of some of the world's most rigorous public health systems, and they point in one direction: the longer a person stays, and the more their body is meant to recover there, the higher the protection that space deserves.

The precautionary principle the UAE has already applied to air quality, food safety, road safety, and digital child protection applies here too, and the logic is identical: where the evidence points toward harm, you do not wait for certainty before acting. This is the right moment to extend that same seriousness to the electromagnetic environment.

The answer is not to pull back from the connectivity that defines modern life in the UAE. It is to design the spaces where family life happens with the same intelligence and care that the UAE brings to everything it builds. The solution is electromagnetic shielding - integrating protective materials directly into the structure of buildings, from the walls and floors to the electrical systems running behind them, so that the invisible environment inside our homes, schools, and hospitals actively supports the health of the people within them. When I founded EMFIS®, this was the problem I set out to solve: to give builders, developers, and institutions a credible, certified, and measurable way to protect the people inside their buildings from unnecessary electromagnetic exposure. That work is recognised by Switzerland's national standardisation body, a member of ISO, and we are present in the UAE and ready to build alongside every institution that shares this vision.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed said the family's "growth, stability and effectiveness are a shared responsibility." That is precisely how we hear it, not as the task of any single ministry, but as a national commitment that belongs to every sector of the country, including the one that builds the physical spaces where family life happens. The decisions made at design phase today will shape the electromagnetic environment of thousands of families for decades. An EMF audit, protective shielding built into structure, and precautionary standards across schools, hospitals, and homes are not additions to the Year of the Family - they are expressions of it.

The late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan taught us that the family is the foundation of every strong society. A strong foundation must be built with care - in every material, every system, and in every invisible dimension of the environment we create for the people we love. Growing in unity means building in unity.