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

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.

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 other scientific experts and specialised teams.
• Specifically, develop a methodological framework for the Risk Monitor that links in a consistent way dynamic risk information and early warnings with risk trends, forecasts, scenarios and events that could lead to crisis in a short to medium term:
• collect and model climate related forecasts and their potential impact data as a input for the causal loops
• investigate crisis type-country dependent vulnerabilities
• The analysis that will provide more refined inputs for early warning processes in the form of warnings and alerts consisting of:
• perform a trend analysis for various climate variables in order to identify potential anomalies that could fit in early warning assessment as primary signals
• model exposure and vulnerability to certain climate hazards (e.g. floods and droughts) as the core part of the early warning risk assessment
• explore ways to model causal relations between various climatic signals and their potential humanitarian impacts applying the knowledge on vulnerability drivers
• help with translating the potential anomalies from risk monitor into an aggregated measure that could serve as an anticipatory metric

This work will involve following responsibilities: 

• Liaseing at strategic level with implementing partners on methodology and software development.
• Attend and help lead on project meetings, including joining missions, to discuss concept and methodology, as well as present the results to users and partners of INFORM
• Collect, pre-process, and harmonize diverse datasets, with a focus on humanitarian, weather, and climate data
• Develop and implement machine learning and deep learning models using Python and libraries such as sklearn, Keras, TensorFlow, or PyTorch
• Create and deploy early warning systems for climate-related events
• Visualize and interpret complex data, providing actionable insights for our team and stakeholders
• Preparation of technical documentation, evaluation and reporting

The incumbent performs other duties within their functional profile as deemed necessary for the efficient functioning of the Office and the Organization.

4.      Institutional Arrangement

The advertised position is to be funded by CRAF’d[1] and ECHO. UNDP, as the project lead of INFORM Warning and receiver of the CRAF’d and ECHO (European Commission) funding, will contract his position. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy will host the selected candidate.