YOUR FUNCTION

The Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) has a new position for a PhD Candidate to work on a project titled “Integrated decision-making framework of climate change adaptation”.
Adaptation measures aimed at reducing the impacts of natural hazards (e.g., physical protection infrastructure, nature-based solutions, property-level adaptation, insurance) are often evaluated in isolation, and often only in terms of monetary benefits. When adaptation options, executed by a wide range of stakeholders ranging from households, governments and insurers, are combined, interactions, trade-offs and synergies should be considered.
However, this is a complex task, because decision-making regarding adaptation can involve a large number of potential policy pathways, with varying spatial-temporal impacts (e.g., who benefits and who bears the costs). Moreover, costs and benefits that are not easily expressed in monetary terms (e.g., biodiversity and livelihood impacts) are important to integrate transparently into decision-making processes.
You will contribute to continuous development of the existing Geographical, Environmental, and Behavioural (GEB) model, to include and improve decision-making mechanisms based on dynamic adaptation policy pathways. These adaptation pathways will be evaluated based on a range of metrics, such as flood and drought risk, nature/biodiversity metrics and measures of social welfare. A mechanism needs to be developed that allows making trade-offs between these different impact measures. The main aim of this research is then to develop a reinforcement learning algorithm (AI) that can be used to automatically optimize these adaptation pathways.
The PhD project will be supervised by Dr Jens de Bruijn, Dr Max Tesselaar and Prof. Jeroen Aerts.

• you will obtain a PhD in environmental sciences, which means that you will be working on developing new methodologies, and publishing advances in scientific journals
• you will join an interdisciplinary team of PhDs and other researchers who work on improving societal adaptation capacity to future climate change. For example, several other PhDs currently work with the GEB model, each with their own focus. There are also PhDs currently working on ecosystem valuation and social welfare impacts of climate change.
• you are expected to contribute 0.1 FTE (10% of working time) to support teaching in BSc and MSc educational programs and supervise BSc and MSc students
• you will contribute to the scientific community, for example by working with others at IVM and presenting your results at international conferences