This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.
Goals and Approach:
The PREP researcher will focus time on efforts that support the project: “Cost-Effective Resource Allocation Strategies for Community Resilience.” (Applied Economics Office, Dr. Jennifer Helgeson and Dr. Christina Gore)
It is expected that the PREP Researcher will engage in all steps of the research process, including but not limited to: literature review, data collection, data analysis, preparation of reports and archival journal articles, as well as reporting and communication with stakeholders.
The objective of this role is to support community resilience planning through the development of methods and tools that evaluate the economic impacts of disruptive events and persistent stressors, while accounting for stakeholder perceptions and associated decisions related to future event uncertainty and co-benefit (co-cost) valuation. There will be special focus on criteria and methods to improve the resilient performance of structural systems in the built environment while maintaining cost-effectiveness and supporting community-defined objectives in addition to resilience.
There is a shocking lack of coordination across Greenhouse Gas mitigation and climate resilience and adaptation. This researcher will address identification of and suggestions for core needs for analyzing the synergies and tradeoffs in evaluation of climate change mitigation and adaptation (and resilience) together.
This research will explore synergies, and possibly tradeoffs, between adaptation and mitigation. It is clear that ambitious GHG mitigation is also critical to adaptation success. As noted by the AR6 IPCC Synthesis Report, “The effectiveness of adaptation, including ecosystem-based and most water-related options, will decrease with increasing warming”. At the same time, some mitigation measures, deployed at certain scales, can have negative impacts on sustainable development and adaptation. For example, afforestation or production of biomass crops can have adverse socio-economic and environmental impacts, including on biodiversity, food and water security, local livelihoods and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, especially if implemented at large scales. Many gaps in knowledge remain about these synergies and trade-offs and frameworks for assessment. This work will highlight system transitions that can help exploit synergies and avoid trade-off, and also try to identify critical areas for future research. This will include: new modeling approaches, interdisciplinarity, bringing together qualitative and quantitative information, and developing more inclusive scenarios. The researcher may draw from peer reviewed and gray literature as well as research focused on cases in both the Global North and Global South for application to the U.S. context.
Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:
- Collaborate on data and methods to improve the methodology for measuring economic impact of community resilience planning, which is organized around the performance metric of ‘cost plus loss’ minimization – i.e., the economically optimal level of investment in prevention and mitigation activities to reduce future disturbance and disaster-related losses, as well as related expenditures that minimize the combined investment cost plus the value of expected losses.
- Create a corpus of papers that discuss frameworks relevant topics .
- Create a review document of frameworks for:
- Climate change adaptation
- GHG mitigation
- Community resilience
- Combinations thereof
- Compare and contrast the different frameworks within the review document of where they are compatible and where there need to be improvements to create one unified framework.
Qualifications
- A graduate degree in Economics, Social Science, Policy, Environmental Science, Law, or related field.
- At least 5 years of relevant research experience.
- Background in econometrics or statistics and at least two of the following areas:
- Applied microeconomics
- Climate change
- Decision-science or behavioral-science
- Environmental economics
- Environmental Law
- Environmental Science
- Non-market valuation
- Policy
- Regional economics
- Risk and uncertainty
- Social Science
- Strong oral and written communication skills.
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