Data Scientist for Early Warning, Crisis Risk, and Impact Assessment - IPSA 10

Background
  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are core principles at UNDP:  we value diversity as an expression of the multiplicity of nations and cultures where we operate, we foster inclusion as a way of ensuring all personnel are empowered to contribute to our mission, and we ensure equity and fairness in all our actions. Taking a ‘leave no one behind’ approach to our diversity efforts means increasing representation of underserved populations. People who identify as belonging to marginalized or excluded populations are strongly encouraged to apply. Learn more about working at UNDP including our values and inspiring stories.
  UNDP does not tolerate sexual exploitation and abuse, any kind of harassment, including sexual harassment, and discrimination. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks.
Project Description

INFORM is a multi-stakeholder initiative for developing open-source, quantitative analysis to support climate adaptation, disaster and crisis prevention, preparedness and response. INFORM partnership brings together development, humanitarian and other actors to manage risk and better respond to crisis when they do occur. OCHA is a coordinator of INFORM partnership.

 

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the technical and scientific lead of INFORM and has led the methodologies development for all INFORM tools. JRC has a portfolio of risk assessment, enhanced situational awareness and early warning projects covering technological, man-made and natural disasters. Under the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC) the JRC is developing a system for storing hazard, exposure, vulnerability and coping capacity data for all types of disasters and collecting knowledge for different phases of disaster risk management. Within this environment, JRC is responsible for the continuous methodological improvements of the operational INFORM tools. To further support the needs of INFORM’s partners from humanitarian and development community, JRC will be offering additional technical and scientific support through the development of new INFORM features and related products. 

 

The selected candidate will work in the INFORM development team at the JRC to develop the INFORM Warning methodology to meet the needs of the humanitarian community. INFORM Partners indicate there is a clear need for open, aggregated, multi-hazard early warning information that is easy to use for decision-making.

INFORM Warning is an ambitious project that will need to integrate scientific/methodological aspects of risk assessment and early warning concepts with system development. The scoping phase has identified the main elements of INFORM Warning which will have to be further refined and designed to be introduced in development and implementation process of the product. The next phase is to develop scientifically sound methodology that will aggregate reliable, quantified, multi-hazard information, risk trends, forecasts, scenarios that warn about events that could lead to crisis impacts in the next 12 months. The new product will create an additional level of analysis that describes the changes of risk at country level over time, as well as elements of specific scenarios that could lead to crises and basic information about the main drivers of risk and the timing, level and type of impacts. 

The consultant will be involved in the development and implementation of INFORM Warning from conceptual, methodological, modelling, data processing to result interpretation level. The results of the work will be presented in the form of technical reports and scientific papers, collection of harmonized datasets, causal relation machine learning modelling, early warning risk models.

 

Duties and Responsibilities

The selected candidate will be expected to contribute to the development of INFORM Warning and be strongly involved in its implementation which encompass the development of innovative early warning risk assessment models for compound and/or cascading hazards and impacts on population. 

 

This work is expected to contribute to the following:

 

• Develop and cultivate strategic relationships with other technical experts engaged in advanced analytics and keep up to date with and advise on new methodologies in the field.
• Build relationships with key thinkers and practitioners in the academic / research and implementing organization communities
• Application of exisiting scientific research and undertaking new research to develop a methodology for providing early warnings for humanitarian crises using quantitative methods.
• Develop innovative methodological approaches and working with othe