Environmental Specialist

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges.
The Environment and Natural Resources and Blue Economy Global Practice (ENB GP): The ENB GP has been established to deliver on the opportunities, benefits and outcomes offered by enhanced management of the environment and natural resources! One specific ENB GP responsibility is to support effective environmental risk management, and to ensure good environmental management across our work in part through the implementation of the Bank’s environmental policies and its Environmental and Social Framework (ESF).
ESF brings the World Bank’s environmental and social (E&S) protections into closer harmony with those of other development institutions and makes important advances in areas such as transparency, non-discrimination, social inclusion, public participation, and accountability – including expanded roles for grievance redress mechanisms. The framework helps to ensure social inclusion and explicitly references human rights in the overarching vision statement!
This position is based in New Delhi, India and focuses on pollution management, environmental risk management and particularly air quality management (AQM). Air pollution in India is a multi-sector and multi-jurisdictional challenge. It has originally been tackled by a city-by-city approach, but poor air quality in Indian cities is driven not only by urban sources, such as transport, industry, and power generation, as is common in other countries, but also by a range of rural sources outside the cities, and sources beyond state borders. It is well known that crop residue burning in Punjab and Haryana affects air quality in the NCR (National Capital Region) but other agricultural sources (e.g. fertilizer and livestock manure) may contribute more to high air pollution. In Kanpur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, 50 percent of air pollution is contributed by sources that lie outside the city boundary, and some outside the boundary of the State. This a general situation with many cities in India. Within India the most severely polluted region is the vast and high populated Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) (comprising of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, and Jharkhand). Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are additionally home to India’s largest contiguous population of households with incomes below the poverty line.
Together with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) and particularly the Departments of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in IGP states, the World Bank has developed a large AQM program that intends to substantively improve air quality throughout IGP by the early 2030s through a combination of lending, technical assistance and concessional grant finance. The program also includes AQM activities in Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
The ENB GP in South Asia seeks to recruit a highly skilled Environmental Specialist who would work as part of various task teams involved in developing (preparing) and providing implementation support to World Bank-financed projects/activities, particularly on AQM. The Environmental Specialist will report to the ENB Practice Manager for the South Asia Region (SAR) and work as part of the World Bank India Country Unit.
Duties and responsibilities: