This paper discusses sustainable strategies have been implemented to improve the energy performance for the housing sector in arid climate, especially villas. A practical case study along with field measurements is presented in order to highlight the behavior of the energy performance after implementing energy conservation measures in practice. The residential sector in arid climate especially in GulfCountries has a significant share of carbon emissions. Millions of householders occupy villas and town houses. The harsh hot weather of this region is one of the reasons for a high demand on the cooling energy and the electricity consumption in the housing sector. Thus, there is a real potential to retrofit the existing houses with practical energy conservation measures. These techniques are affordable and feasible economically. Also, they play a substantial role to increase the energy efficiency of the residential units on the demand side. This study discusses the results of 12 months were monitored after implementation of energy savings measures on selected 10 villas in the capital of UAE - Abu Dhabi. This research highlights different responses by each villa against the implemented energy savings opportunities. The target of these executed strategies is to improve the energy performance of these selected villas after conducting a detailed energy assessment and implementing its recommendations. A detailed analysis of the electricity performance of the baseline and the monitoring period has been performed by using the actual readings of the existing power meters according to the international performance measurement and verification protocol. This research presents the energy data for the entire year before and after the implementation of the energy conservation measures - ECMs. These ECMs show the potential of improvement of energy performance in the housing sector by increasing the energy efficiency by 25.1% in average through low and medium cost techniques. The percentage of savings varies from 14.4% to 47.6% of the total electricity according to the individual operating conditions for each villa and the behavior of occupants. As a result, they contribute reducing the carbon and GHG emissions, and open new perspectives of energy savings for housing sector in arid climates. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.