Speakers

Dr Abdel Karim  AbdRabo
ARCA Executive Director

Biography:

Mohamed Abdel-Karim Aly Abdrabo is professor of environmental economics at the Institute of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Alexandria. Mohamed is the executive director of an International Development Research Centre (IDRC) sponsored project for the establishment of the Alexandria Research Center for Adaptation to Climate Change (ARCA) at the University of Alexandria. He was a lead author and member of the Summary for Policy Makers core team for the upcoming Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. Mohamed worked as advisor to the Center for Environment and Development for the Arab Region and Europe and as a consultant to a number of environment-related research projects in a number of countries in the region. His research work is in the fields of environmental and urban socioeconomic assessments, economics of the environment and vulnerability and adaptation to impacts of climate change. Mohamed received a Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool, UK.

"Electricity consumption in Urban environment under climate change"

It is projected that increasing temperature attributed to climate change may increase demand for electricity for air conditioning purposes in the residential sector in the future. This may create more pressure on electricity generation and distribution in Egypt and would require identifying and assessing adaptation actions, especially electricity shortages and blackouts would have significant ramification for residential as well as production sectors.
The paper in hand intends to assess the impact of increasing temperature and humidity attributed to climate change on seasonal residential electricity consumption in Alexandria city, Egypt. Thereafter, potential soft and hard actions to adapt to such impacts are considered. For this purpose, seasonal changes in electricity consumption were investigated.
Running panel data regression analysis at district level suggests that maximum temperature and humidity, along with population number and GDP per capita, are significantly influencing residential electricity consumption in Alexandria. It was expected that Alexandria will experience warming and humid conditions under different scenarios of climate change up to 2050. This, in turn, will lead to significant increase in electricity consumption in residential sector in summer season under RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5 scenarios, respectively. Such an expected increase in electricity consumption will require constructing additional electricity power generation facilities and upgrading electricity network capacities. Alternatively, other soft adaptation options may include applying price mechanisms (market forces), introducing more stringent electricity efficiency standards for air conditioning equipment and enforcing urban planning and designs that may improve internal housing environments and thus reducing the need for air conditioning.