About the program:
The Ross Center for Sustainable Cities builds on WRI’s global and local experience in urban planning and mobility and uses proven solutions and action-oriented tools to make the fast-growing urban environment more resilient to new challenges. The Urban Development Program is committed to designing and influencing urban spaces that build resilience, improve health, and equitably connect people and opportunities. As part of the Data For Cool Cities Initiative , our data team is developing geospatial datasets, analytics and tools to support urban decision makers in implementing cooling infrastructure for reducing population exposure to extreme heat. Internship Highlight:
Reporting to the Data Product Manager of the Cities Data team, you will contribute to the development of urban heat analysis and datasets that can support European and Global South cities in addressing extreme heat challenges.
You will participate in identifying, documenting and collecting heat-related datasets specific for European context, conduct geospatial data analysis for understanding the spatial distribution and severity of urban heat in different cities, produce statistical analysis and maps for estimating the cooling impact of heat-resilient infrastructure (tree cover, shade, water bodies etc).
What you will do:
In this role, you will:
Collect, document, clean and analyze geospatial data for better assessing urban heat stress in different European Cities (Land Surface Temperature, Air temperature, tree canopy, urban population distribution, urban infrastructure...)Perform data analysis on existing data, and support research for identifying alternative data sources (specific for European context) and calculating geospatial indicatorsDevelop spatial analysis and produce static and interactive maps for addressing use cases identified by our stakeholders: identifying urban hotspots, mapping priority areas for implementing cooling infrastructure, estimating cooling benefits of various cooling interventions scenarios, estimating population exposure to extreme heatDocument methodology and communicate finding and insights with the data teamContribute to blogs, data visualization and other communication productsWhat you will need:
Confident use of Python and/or RFamiliarity with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial analysis tools (QGIS, Google Earth Engine, Carto etc) and geospatial libraries (rasterstat, xarray, shapefile, geopandas, sf, rasterio, gee etc) Familiarity with working with geospatial datasets (satellite imagery, climate data, census, urban features etc) and geospatial data formats (both raster and vector data)Familiarity with statistics and geo-statistics concepts and methods Strong written and verbal communication skillsAbility to document methodologyCurrently pursuing a degree in GIS, Geo-information and earth observation computer science, data science, computational urban planning, quantitative geography, environmental modellingMust be registered in a study program with a Dutch college or university for the full duration of the internshipYou are proficient in verbal and written EnglishConditions of the internship:
This is a 6 month internship with a start date of 16 September 2024.This internship will be based at the WRI Europe office in The Hague with some flexibility to work from home. This internship offers a reimbursement of 700 euros per month based on full-time working hours (32 hours per week).How to apply: