DrAlaa Al Khourdajie

Dr Alaa Al Khourdajie is an Advanced Research Fellow at Imperial College London, Department of Chemical Engineering. His research programme spans three interconnected areas: the impact of disruptive events, overshoot, and tipping points on climate change mitigation scenarios; artificial intelligence for climate science; and policy-relevant scenario assessment. He employs integrated assessment models (IAMs) to examine interactions and trade-offs among technology, policy, economics, and physical climate, with a focus on pathways to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

He developed the Disruptive Events-Resilient Pathways (DERPs) framework, which maps mitigation trajectories along dimensions of ambition and system resilience. His work on overshoot examines the distinction between reversible biophysical changes and irreversible socioeconomic losses, while his research on climate finance explores how investors' expectations about climate risks can enable or hinder mitigation. Methodologically, he applies decomposition methods, machine learning techniques, and AI methods to assess large scenario ensembles and to augment scenario development and scientific assessment processes. His recent publications include work on AI governance for scientific assessments, deep learning for scenario generation, and definitions of 'abated' fossil fuels using carbon capture and storage. 

Alaa is a Lead Author for the IPCC Working Group III 7th Assessment Report (AR7) (2025-29). He is a Member of the IPCC Task Group on Data (TG-Data) and is co-initiating an IPCC Ad-hoc Group on AI integration. He co-leads a section of the World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP) assessment of high-impact events and tipping points, and served on the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) of the upcoming joint WCRP-IPCC Co-sponsored Workshop on Earth system high impact events, tipping points, and their consequences. He also served as Lead Author on the UN Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook (GEO7, 2022-25). He delivered the keynote on AI for the IPCC at the IPCC Workshop on Methods of Assessment (University of Reading, 2026). These roles build on his previous position as Senior Scientist in the IPCC AR6 Technical Support Unit and Contributing Author during AR6.

At the policy interface, his work has informed policy and legal forums. He supported UNFCCC negotiations and SBSTA, including the Global Stocktake, and was part of the IPCC team briefing the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to provide scientific insights for the case on 'obligations of States in respect of climate change.' He presented at COP30's UK Pavilion (2025), moderated sessions at COP27, and served as panellist at COP28. He serves on the Academic Board of the Cambridge-Bloomberg Sustainability Corporate Bond Index.

On funded research, he leads Work Package 4 in the EU Horizon project DIAMOND (concluding November 2026) and is Co-Investigator on FUTURA (Horizon Europe, awarded 2025). He is a Guest Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) since May 2022, and was a guest researcher at Utrecht University and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) in 2023.

He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bath (2017), focusing on applied game theory and climate change cooperation.

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