Job Vacancy // Researcher / Research Scholar - Climate Impacts and Damages

This job vacancy was initially published on the IIASA website.

About IIASA

IIASA is committed to a working environment that promotes equality, diversity, tolerance and inclusion within its workforce. This is reflected in their IIASA core values. IIASA encourages qualified candidates from all religious, ethnic, and social backgrounds to apply. In the case that candidates are equally qualified, preference will be given to applicants from countries where IIASA has a  Member Organization.

Background

The role and tasks will evolve, in the medium- to long-term likely contributing to activities in various projects (such as Horizon Europe projects), collaborating with other scientific experts and engaging with relevant communities (e.g. impacts, attribution, risks, compounds), in Europe and across the world. These activities may contribute to scientific assessments in of themselves, for public-facing dissemination such as climate risk dashboards, and/or to other modelling activities such as the representation of climate impacts in integrated assessment modelling.

Main tasks and responsibilities

• Apply and adapt the RIME-X workflows to generate scenario-based projections of climate impact drivers, exposure and risk
• Contribute to / develop new methodology for attribution analysis in the RIME-X framework using ISIMIP3a obsclim/counterclim runs
• Contribute to / develop new methodology for compound extreme indicators in the RIME-X framework
• Produce and refine climate impact indicators across different clusters (health/heat, food/water, marine, energy/transport, economy/labor, fire/air quality, compound extremes)
• Process large volumes of multi-model gridded climate and impact data into consistent indicators and statistics
• Support internal review and external communication with appropriate analysis and material
• Develop and document version-controlled code for development of methods and reproducible re-processing of data and analysis
• Contribute to / lead written outputs, including reports and scientific papers
• Present methods and results to technical and non-technical audiences

Skills, qualifications and experience

Education and Background:

• Master's (R1) or PhD (R2) degree in a related field of physical/natural sciences or engineering (e.g. mathematics/physics, climate science/earth/environmental science, hydrology, civil engineering)

Essential skills and competencies:

• Knowledge of climate change modelling and impacts, attribution methods, compound extreme methodologies and statistics, and development of indicators of climate extremes and compounds
• Knowledge of and experience with the transfer of risk from physical hazards onto socioeconomic sectors, infrastructure and demographic cohorts
• Proficient programmer, with experience in packages such as xarray, pandas, numpy, scipy
• Familiarity with climate/impact model output (e.g. ISIMIP, CMIP6) and gridded geospatial datasets (netCDF)
• Knowledge of relevant statistical methods (distributions, regressions, percentiles, return-periods, extreme value theory, non-stationary trend analysis, copula methods of compound & multivariate extremes)
• Demonstrated experience in writing up methodologies and results in reports, scientific publications and/or policy-relevant materials
• Full fluency in English, both written and spoken.
• Ability to work well as part of a team and independently.

Desirable skills:

• Familiarity with global scenario and integrated assessment modelling frameworks is desired

Further information and application

More information on the job vacancy and the application can be found here.