About

Alaa Al Khourdajie is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London and a Guest Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He works on climate change mitigation: the pathways and scenarios that describe it, carbon capture and storage and what counts as abated emissions, irreversibility under temperature overshoot and return, and the methods by which scenario evidence is assessed for policy. His work on overshoot covers the socioeconomic impacts of exceeding a temperature level and of the decline that follows, and how Earth system tipping elements bear on those impacts.

He is a Lead Author for the IPCC Working Group III contribution to the Seventh Assessment Report, working on Chapter 14 and leading the Working Group III cross-chapter assessment of carbon capture and storage and carbon capture and utilisation. He is a Lead Author on the World Climate Research Programme assessment of high-impact events, tipping points and irreversible regional impacts, and was a Lead Author on the seventh Global Environment Outlook of the UN Environment Programme. During the Sixth Assessment cycle he was Senior Scientist in the Working Group III Technical Support Unit, an Editor of the report, and Coordinating Lead Author of its Definitions Annex.

He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Bath, where he worked on the game theory of international climate agreements and their linkage with trade policy.

What is climate change?

Recorded for the IPCC. Alaa sets out what climate change is and what Working Group III assesses, in three minutes.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.