Climate Adaptation Project
“Building Disaster Resilience Across Supply Chains: A co-produced innovation model for understanding, planning and investing in climate change adaptation.”
Position type: Part-time, contract
Term: May 1st, 2024, to August 31st, 2024 Department: Waterloo Climate Institute
Overview
The Climate Institute is hiring one interdisciplinary Graduate Research Assistant for the Spring-Summer 2024 term (16 weeks starting May 1st, 2024). The GRA will support the Climate Institute’s Government of Canada funded research project “Building Disaster Resilience Across Supply Chains: A co-produced innovation model for understanding, planning and investing in climate change adaptation”, carried out in partnership with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Regional Office for the Americas and the Caribbean, the Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies ARISE Canada, and the Trade Facilitation Office Canada.
Responsibilities
The GRA will work on a multi-year project aimed at enhancing adaptation capabilities across supply chains. This involves the development of tools that integrate risk information from multiple partners and an examination of the organizational and behavioral factors influencing the adoption of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction practices.
The GRA will support the research team in the initial project phase by conducting a literature review, assisting in developing materials for the first partners’ inception meeting, and conducting preliminary desk data collection and analysis. This encompasses data analysis for the selection of research sites, participants, and study locations in both Canada and Latin America.
Qualifications
We are seeking a student with a strong research interest and some experience in previous research projects on climate change, business innovation or sustainability more broadly, and with proven communication and writing skills. An interest in interdisciplinary climate change research aligning with work on business and community climate adaptation strategies, capacity building, disaster risk reduction, and governance is highly desirable.
Candidates should have proven research skills, incuding conducting literature reviews, familiarity with research methodologies and data collection and analysis, good communication skills for written and verbal communication, in drafting reports and summaries, and correspondence and liasing with team members and collaborators. The student will need to have flexibility in handling evolving project requirements and the ability to adapt to changing research needs.
At the end of the term, the student will be expected to have delivered:
- A report with a review of academic and grey literature
- A PPT presentation and other materials for a partners first project meeting (with information provided by the lead researcher).
- An organized data set with information provided by the project partners.
Apply for this job
The Waterloo Climate Institute follows the equity policies of the University of Waterloo applied to this position. Interested UWaterloo Masters student should send a half page cover letter and an up-to- date resume/CV to Thy Huynh t29huynh@uwaterloo.ca by March 20th, 2024. Only students registered for the Fall 2024 term will be eligible. GRAs will be paid according to UWaterloo guidelines, and will work an average of 10 hours per week.
