PDRA in the Mountain Multi-Hazard Chain
- Employer
- Durham University
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Salary
- Salary Commensurate with experience
- Date posted
- Jul 27, 2022
View more
- Position Type
- Faculty Positions, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Geography
- Employment Level
- Post-Doc
- Employment Type
- Full Time
You need to sign in or create an account to save a job.
The Role
The Department of Geography at
Durham University seeks to appoint a full-time Grade 7 research
associate to work with Professor Alexander Densmore, Professor Nick
Rosser, Professor Boguslaw Obara, and a wider consortium team on a
project entitled 'Sajag-Nepal: Planning and Preparedness for the
Mountain Hazard and Risk Chain in Nepal'. The project is funded by
the UK Global Challenges Research Fund, and aims to improve
decision-making and preparedness in Nepal in order to mitigate the
impacts and reduce the risks from the mountain hazard chain that is
triggered by earthquakes and monsoon rainfall. The project involves
close collaboration between physical scientists, social scientists,
and a wide range of partner organisations in Nepal and elsewhere,
including government departments, national and international NGOs,
and the UN. The objectives of the project are to (i) contextualise
the contemporary multi-hazard and systemic risk landscape in Nepal,
to understand how risk is produced, experienced, and negotiated by
households and communities, and to embed this understanding in
hazard and risk reduction and management; (ii) transform the
earthquake planning process into national-scale preparedness
planning for catastrophic multi-hazard events triggered by rare
damaging earthquakes; (iii) transform the monsoon planning process
into seasonal planning for monsoon-related multi-hazard events at a
scale that is appropriate for local government decision-making; and
(iv) develop new protocols for embedding local, natural and social
scientific knowledge of the mountain hazard and risk chain in
preparedness and response.
This post will primarily contribute
to objective (i), and will focus on the development and analysis of
the first dynamic, national-scale multi-hazard inventory for Nepal.
This inventory will cover the full earthquake- and
monsoon-triggered hazard chain, including landslides, debris flows,
and sediment aggradation. The post-holder will lead on upscaling an
existing landside mapping and household-level risk assessment
programme, focused on the area that was most badly affected by the
2015 Gorkha earthquake, to the national scale. They will implement
and refine a novel approach to national-scale multi-hazard mapping,
using Google Earth Engine to develop annually-updated multi-hazard
inventories. They will analyse the resulting inventories to
understand the spatial and temporal distributions of different
elements of the mountain hazard chain. They will also work closely
with the interdisciplinary project team to explore the potential
for integrating local and scientific knowledge on the mountain
hazard chain.
The post-holder will be based at
Durham University, but will be expected to work closely with team
members at other UK institutions (Northumbria, Newcastle, Oxford,
Bristol) and with wider members of the consortium, particularly at
the National Society for Earthquake Technology (Nepal) and at the
National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority,
Government of Nepal. The post-holder will also be expected to work
closely with other members of the project team to ensure that the
understanding and tools developed in this project are relevant to
the research needs and skills of a wide range of potential
stakeholders. A key element of the proposed work will be the
development of capacity within the Government of Nepal to maintain
and analyse the inventories, to share the data through existing
online platforms, and to use the inventories to inform discussions
with municipal-level government and community residents about the
hazards and risks that they face.
You need to sign in or create an account to save a job.
Get job alerts
Create a job alert and receive personalized job recommendations straight to your inbox.
Create alert