Abstract

Abstract
Urbanization is formed through the development of cities, making them a centre for transport, trade and ‎information flow. A close link between urbanization and economic growth appears by attracting residents to ‎cities that provide diverse opportunities for education and work, especially in the sectors of Industry and ‎services. Urbanization can be planned or spontaneous. Each has its determinants; planned urbanization might ‎have disparate economic, social, and climate determinants. However, if urbanization is unplanned, its main ‎determinants are internal migration and natural increase. Climate change, including the scarcity of precipitations, ‎heat stress, and moisture level change, might harm agriculture and push agricultural labour to migrate to urban ‎areas.‎
Additionally, studying the impact of climate change is scarce at the level of the Egyptian Governorates. Our ‎study aims to estimate the effect of heat stress, moisture level, and precipitation on the urbanization degree ‎‎(percentage of the urban population). The analysis will be focused on two Egyptian governorates (Dakahlia and ‎Ismailia) from 2000 to 2020. The chosen Governorates include urban and rural areas. The analysis will draw on ‎the compiled data on climate conditions from the Annual Bulletin of Environment Statistics, CAPMAS. The ‎data on the urbanization degree are pooled from the Statistical Year Book, CAPMAS. We will use ‎Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) to estimate the plausible impact of climate change in the two ‎governorates under study. The results show that maximum temperature and humidity significantly affect ‎urbanization in Dakahlia. However, the effect of the lagged values of urbanization is the only significant ‎variable in the Ismailia model. For future research, the study will be extended to cover the remaining Egyptian ‎Governorates, including rural and urban areas‏.‏