Summary
Alaa is currently a Research Fellow at Imperial College London based in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He is involved in the EU project IAM COMPACT. His research spans multiple projects and focuses on the application of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in finance, and the interaction of IAMs with climate emulators. His research interests extend to examining the role of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in climate mitigation, and the use of various statistical methods for assessing scenario data, such as decomposition methods, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and clustering techniques. Alaa earned his Ph.D. in climate change economics from the University of Bath in 2017.
Alaa has been a Research Fellow at Imperial College London since 2019. During the first three years of his fellowship, he served as a full-time Senior Scientist at the Technical Support Unit of Working Group III (WGIII - Climate Mitigation) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He supported the production of the 6th Assessment Report (AR6), where he is also a Contributing Author. His contributions to the assessment were focused on topics related to integrated assessment modelling, and the assessment of mitigation scenarios. He also served as an Ex-Officio Member of the IPCC’s Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data). He continues to support TG-Data through AR7 as Executive Committee member. Alaa contributed to the AR6 Scenarios Database international outreach activities and supported international processes at UNFCCC and SBSTA (such as Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement) in communicating the results of the WGIII assessment report.
Recently, Alaa was appointed as a Lead Author for the 7th Edition of the Global Environment Outlook by the UN Environment Programme. Since June 2022, he has been a Guest Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). In August 2023, he was a guest researcher at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL, Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving).
Publications
Journals
Al Khourdajie A, Skea J, Green R, 2024, Climate ambition, background scenario or the model? Attribution of the variance of energy-related indicators in global scenarios, Energy and Climate Change, Vol:5, ISSN:2666-2787
Peters GP, Al Khourdajie A, Sognnaes I, et al., 2023, AR6 scenarios database: an assessment of current practices and future recommendations, Npj Climate Action, Vol:2
Smith CJ, Al Khourdajie A, Yang P, et al., 2023, Climate uncertainty impacts on optimal mitigation pathways and social cost of carbon, Environmental Research Letters, Vol:18, ISSN:1748-9326