Senior Environmental Engineer

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 South Asia Region comprises eight countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) that range in size from India (with a population of over 1 billion) to Maldives (with 0.3 million people). The region has experienced a long period of robust economic growth, averaging 6% a year over the past 20 years. It was the second-fastest growing region in the world in the aftermath of the global crisis. This strong growth has translated into declining poverty and impressive improvements in human development. The percentage of people living below the poverty line fell in South Asia from 56% to 16% between 1981 and 2013. Still, the region remains home to a third of the world’s poorest, with 216 million people living below $1.9/day.
The Environment and Natural Resources and Blue Economy Global Practice (ENB GP (Global Practice)): 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).
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, from transport, industry, and power generation, as is common in many 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 is 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 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 (international/IBRD and domestic), technical assistance, and concessional grant finance to each of the jurisdictions in IGP. The IGP program also includes AQM activities in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan.
Besides the World Bank, the IGP AQM program engages a set of development partners that intends to provide financial, political, and technical support. The program is running an AQM awareness campaign lead by the World Banks regional vice president.
The ENB GP in South Asia seeks to recruit a skilled Senior Environmental Engineer to provide environmental management support to Bank-financed projects with a focus on air Quality, and contribute to developing and supervising ENB projects, particularly in addressing pollution and environmental health. The Senior Environmental Engineer, who will work as part of an India AQM team in the World Bank office in Delhi, will report to the ENB Practice Manager for the South Asia Region (SAR).
Duties and responsibilities: