Description: Conservation International and the City University of New York’s Environmental Sciences Initiative are launching an initiative with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) to explore opportunities for investing in green infrastructure in the member nations of the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa. Over the course of two years, a working group of scientists, policymakers, and private sector experts will synthesize the latest knowledge on freshwater ecosystems, the services they provide, the extant and potential infrastructural and behavioral interventions humans use to manage these services, and the potential impacts of such decisions on both ecosystems and society. The initiative will produce actionable guidance on green infrastructure investment for water resources management in sub-Saharan Africa and facilitate its uptake by decisionmakers. We are seeking a summer intern to join and support this initiative.
Duties: The intern will work closely with CI’s Associate Scientist for Nature and the Global Sustainability Agenda to develop the initiative’s activities and outcomes, including mapping priority areas for green infrastructure investment using both existing datasets and model scenarios.
- The work will comprise conceptual and spatial, qualitative and quantitative approaches, will be co-developed with decision-makers in both the public and private sectors, and will use the UN Sustainable Development Goal framework as an organizing principle.
- In addition to generating policy-relevant guidance, journal publications exploring the conceptual and spatial relationships between freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide will also be developed.
- The intern will be encouraged to identify opportunities for new analyses relevant to the mission of the workshop and to lead their pursuit and publication.
Qualifications:
Required
- The ideal candidate will have strong technical skills in GIS, statistics, programming, and remote sensing, as well as subject matter expertise in hydrology, land use/land cover change, human geography, international development, and policy/governance/finance.
Preferred