You’ll be working in a multi-disciplinary research team (industrial ecology, agricultural and forest science, earth systems science, agroecology, material science, sustainable development) in developing effective strategies that deliver high-value results and insights in an efficient and effective manner.
Your work will include geospatial data analytics in the broad sense of the definition, ranging from method development, to data collection, processing, analysis, visualisation in static and interactive maps, and to insights. Next to the technical aspects of data analytics, one of your main challenges will be to communicate your data-driven insights in a way that successfully influences action with our partners. The main tools you will use for your analysis are QGIS, Python, and Google Sheet.
We are looking for a colleague with strong analytical skills and high attention to detail, but also the ability to zoom out and use your creativity to find new solutions. You should be comfortable working autonomously, and also as part of a close-knit interdisciplinary team.
The position is a full-time role and has a flexible starting date.
As a team member of the Metabolic Institute you will divide your time over two key research projects;
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1/ CENTRINNO
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2/GMI.
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About CENTRINNO
CENTRINNO is a European Horizon 2020 funded project that seeks to test and scale alternative urban regeneration strategies for industrial heritage sites that foster inclusivity, sustainability and circularity. In nine diverse European cities, CENTRINNO will establish creative, locally productive and inclusive hubs in former industrial sites which become testbeds for teaching, training and innovation for a new circular urban manufacturing model.
Within CENTRINNO, Metabolic Institute is developing an integrated approach that allows pilots to map resources, tools, skills and stakeholders available in their wider urban ecosystem that are key in fostering socially inclusive, circular and productive value chains. Metabolic’s approach is centered around an extended Urban Metabolism concept that will combine material flow analyses with geospatial mapping targeted to each city’s complex urban context. At the center of this approach stands a spatially explicit analysis of each city’s municipal waste system, allowing pilots to gain high-level insights into the potential for locally reusing urban waste streams. This waste-based analysis will be embedded in a process of mapping additional elements of each city’s urban ecosystem, such as geodemographics, environmental conditions and stakeholder networks.
The Global Metabolism Initiative maps the impacts of global economic activity in relation to our planet’s resources, guiding business and policy leaders on the levers needed to keep the economy within planetary boundaries. Specifically, the GMI combines large datasets to analyze human activity and its impact on the planet. By using a global spatial analysis of material stocks and flows, alongside sectoral deep dives that map key value chains to context-specific impacts, the GMI identifies Where social and environmental impacts are most felt.
The Global Metabolism Initiative (GMI) dashboard combines global and national datasets with academic journals into one public tool. This tool is still under development and communicates the impacts of natural resource consumption, across a range of indicators, with unprecedented scope and spatial granularity. The beta version of the tool already includes global crop cultivation and forestry production to assess impact across biodiversity, climate change, land degradation, water risk and air pollution.