Summary
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 in the assessment were focused on topics related to integrated assessment modelling, mitigation scenarios assessment, and he served as the Ex-Officio Member of the IPCC’s Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data). 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 Assessment 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).
Currently based in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College, Alaa is involved in the EU project IAM COMPACT and the UK project Climate Compatible Growth. His research spans multiple projects and focuses on the application of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in finance and their interaction with climate emulators. He also explores the roles of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). His ongoing work includes assessing scenarios using statistical decomposition methods and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), as well as clustering techniques. Alaa earned his Ph.D. in climate change economics from the University of Bath in 2017.
Personal webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/akhourdajie/
Publications
Journals
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
Kikstra JS, Nicholls ZRJ, Smith CJ, et al., 2022, The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures, Geoscientific Model Development, Vol:15, ISSN:1991-959X, Pages:9075-9109