Renewable Energy Options and Built Environment in the Gulf Cooperation Countries Adapting to Combat Climate Change

This study utilizes the long-term data (1955–2022) of the weather parameters recorded in Bahrain, as well as other studies on Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCCC) published by IPCC and the climate knowledge portal established by the World Bank for each country, to forecast the climate by 2050/2100. In forecasting the weather in Bahrain, we used the Exponential (cubic) regression since it was found to have the highest correlation coefficient for long-term data in Bahrain, for both Average and Anomalies data. This study is novel in connecting renewable energy option and built environment with climate change impact. It will enable researchers, policy makers, architects, and building designers to cater to the impact of climate change. One common impact of climate change on GCCC is the expected substantial rise in temperature (about 6–8 °C) by 2100, and subsequently the dust storms (may be increasing by 10%) which urges inhabitants to consider PV technology (both thermal PV and concentrator PV) much more than Solar Thermal Concentrators (CSP) as the latter is very sensitive to dust. The forecasted wind speed in Bahrain (and some GCC countries) shows declination (about 10%) favors utility of larger number of integrated micro-wind generators to buildings (to produce wind electricity). The forecasted precipitation in GCC countries tends to slightly increase by 10% to 20% while humidity tends to decrease slightly by 5–10%. The sea level rise is already witnessing an increase by 100% for the period from 1993 to 2015 (span of 22 years). These figures urge policy makers to set a Build Environment policy taking into consideration in building design and using special renewable energy devices with specification that bear and resists future weather parameters.