Water risk intern

Water Risk Intern for the Vaal River Basin

Overview:

WRI's Markets & Enterprise Program seeks a full-time, energetic intern to join the Water Risk Team. The Markets and Enterprise Program seeks to direct the flow of capital towards sustainable businesses, doing research and building tools to assess and integrate environmental risk and opportunities into business strategy and investment decisions. Water scarcity, partly driven by climate change, is an area where the Program seeks to provide company managers and investors with more detailed and actionable information.

The intern will play a key research role in the Aqueduct project, which measures and maps companies' and investors' water risk.

More specifically, the intern will analyze trends in different drivers of water-related business risks in the Vaal river basin in South Africa

Aqueduct will be an online database and suite of applications to quantify, aggregate and map the physical, regulatory and socio-economic components of water risks. Companies and their investors are increasingly recognizing the importance of these risks leveraging their key competencies to decrease their water dependency and/or increase their water security. Aqueduct is not only an online global database with localized water risk information, but also seeks to become the global standard for measuring and reporting geographic water risk.

Aqueduct will enable:

* Companies to better map and manage water risk for their global operations and supply chains at the local level,
* Governments and organizations to develop more effective investment programs and policy reforms, and
* Investors to more accurately assess companies' water risks.

The intern will play a key role in expanding Aqueduct to river basins around the world, starting with the Vaal in South Africa.

Responsibilities:

* Work with the Water Risk Team, specifically the Associate I analyst, to locate and analyze water risk data from a variety of sources
* Write support presentations on water scarcity issues associated and investment risks and opportunities
* Review relevant literature and speak with relevant experts for the Vaal river,
* Collaborate with related initiatives such as life cycle analysis, other water risk indices, global hydrological models, and new global data sets,
* Contribute to the Aqueduct website and outreach efforts , and
* Support the Water Risk Team as required.

Qualifications:

* Excellent research, communication and presentation skills,
* Excellent command of English and demonstrated writing skills,
* Ability to present complex information in a clear and concise manner,
* Results focused, organized, comfortable working independently within a collaborative research team,
* Undergraduate degree in finance, economics, business, hydrology, physical or human geography, or engineering, preferably with a demonstrated understanding of water issues and their business and investment implications, and
* Knowledge of and experience with excel, database, statistical software, and GIS software or web design preferred.

Location: Washington, DC 20002. Start date: the position is scheduled to start as soon as possible.

This is an unpaid internship but provides a great opportunity to learn and establish a record with the leading environmental organization.