Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), New Delhi
Research Intern – Climate Risks (Data)
 

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Designation offered: Research Intern – Climate Risks (Data)
Team: Climate Risk
Reporting to:Programme Lead 
Location: New Delhi, India
Duration:2 months (extendable based on performance)

Project Description – Developing a Climate Risk Atlas 
Background & Context
Recent studies show that only 800 million people are at risk due to climate change in India. These numbers are likely to increase four-fold if an integrated approach is not adopted. Climate change will contribute to making rainfall erratic, thereby leading to rising seas which will further intensify the weather events to extreme levels. As a result, an increase in the occurrence of floods, drought and heat waves will be witnessed. From a risk perspective, climate change is primarily a risk management problem and ideally, climate change policies should target limiting the probability of a very bad outcome to an unacceptably small value (GAR, 2019). In a recently released report by CEEW, more than 75 per cent of the Indian districts are extreme events hotspots.

Many studies are commissioned to look at understanding the nature of impacts across sectors under climate change scenarios but what it lacks is quantifying the risks, so that effective management of these risks can be phased into policy planning, designing and implementation thereby optimizing the resource allocation. Until now disaster preparedness is based on corpus allocation of the public expenditure under extreme weather events.

The Climate Risk Atlas (CRA) is a risk-informed decision-making toolkit and will try to answer the underlying questions pertinent to climate risk management by quantifying the impact of climate change on various sectors in the form of a risk index.

The CRA will help in addressing the following underlying perspectives
i) Understanding the perception of “Risks” and identifying the underlying risk drivers across sectors can provide a strong rationale for pursuing development pathways.
ii) Estimate and project the degree of disaster risks associated with different kinds of hazards faced by specific sectors of the national economies in India through regional downscaling (South Asia).
iii) Understanding the components of critical infrastructure.

The project is aimed to develop a region-specific climate risk atlas with specificity to India for specific hazards like flood, drought, cyclones and heat waves through a climatology interfaced risk model to predict the degree of risk (quantifying the losses) for an effective risk-informed decision-making process. This will also lead to the creation of a robust database on the vulnerability index of the elements at risk across regions thereby estimating the probable minimum and maximum loss.

Job Duties and Responsibilities: 

Research, Analysis and Research Writing: 

The research intern is expected to assist researchers in the team in the following:

• Contribute to desk-top research and mining data from structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources to develop and improve our exposure maps and products
• A coalition of the ancillary data with the Spatio-temporal data for vulnerability analysis
• To perform spatially and meta-analysis of climatological variables using mapping and ML-based tools
• Creating a sector-specific database for the hazard-specific location which can feed into the climatology analysed datasheets
• Creating shapefiles for sectorial hazard and vulnerability analysis
• Help in integrating risk metrics RI toolkit
• Preparing GIS-based climate hazards hot spots
• Should be able to use modelling languages (e.g. R, Python), tools like GRADS, MARS, etc. and modern systems of scientific repeatability and engineering scalability (e.g. GitHub)
• Should support the development of tools and user-interfaced products based on data and analytics on different extreme climate events

Programme Assistance

• Respond to research requests from senior researchers, discuss research needs, and prepare responses that synthesise and analyse information. 
• Assist with programme implementation, including help with preparing presentations. 
• Assist with building a database and relationships with a broader community of experts, scholars, institutions and potential donors in the energy, environment and water domains. 
• Assist with planning and executing events such as report launches, consultation workshops, round table discussions, etc. 
• Contribute to reports and other research products as part of the research team. 
• Participate constructively in weekly team meetings. 

CEEW operates in a dynamic environment and the candidate will be required to show flexibility in undertaking a variety of tasks.

Selection Criteria

Education

• Bachelors/Masters in Environment engineering/climate science policy and other allied fields. Candidates pursuing Bachelor's/Master's can apply.

Technical and Software Skills

• Qualitative and Quantitative analytical skills 
• Hands-on experience with analytical tools and software- MS Office/ArcGIS/SPSS/Advance Excel/python/R

CEEW operates in a dynamic environment and the candidate will be required to show flexibility in undertaking a variety of tasks.

Compensation
Competitive compensation – commensurate to the experience and matching the best of standards adopted by industry or other similar organizations for similar roles.

Application Process

CEEW is an equal opportunity employer and the selection process does not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or caste. Female candidates are encouraged to apply.

The last date to send applications is 30th July 2022. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Interested applicants are advised to apply at the earliest possible.
Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. We appreciate your interest.