We are seeking a (Senior) Climate & Energy Data Scientist to strengthen our scenario and data capabilities at the interface of global mitigation pathways, climate policy analysis, and decision-relevant insights for countries.
In this role, you will contribute to core projects including the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) assessments, the National Pathway Explorer (NPE 1.5), and global mitigation scenario analysis looking at Highest Possible Ambition (HPA) (e.g. using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) such as REMIND/GCAM). You will produce policy-relevant indicators such as 1.5°C compatibility, overshoot, CDR, methane, and fossil fuel phase-out timelines.
You will build and maintain robust, reproducible analytical workflows in Python to curate, evaluate, and interpret emissions and energy-system scenarios and support assessments of national pathways (e.g., nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and other country plans). You will work closely with the Climate Scientist to interpret the temperature implications of key scenario indicators — including carbon dioxide removal, land use, fossil fuel phase-out, and short-lived climate pollutants — drawing on climate emulator outputs. You will work as part of a multidisciplinary team that includes climate scientists, data scientists, economists, and policy and diplomacy experts.
Your Responsibilities
- Develop and assess global / national / sectoral mitigation pathways for their general use in project work.
- Support evaluation of country pathways and policy packages (e.g., NDCs and related plans), including comparisons against Paris-aligned benchmarks and pathway features such as overshoot, CDR, methane and other super-pollutants.
- Maintain and help evolve the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) scenario and assessment workflows, including routine running, documentation, and ongoing maintenance of global aggregation, equity, and country-level modelled pathway assessments, with links to temperature/climate-emulator pipelines where relevant.
- Support data harmonisation and downscaling workflows as backup capacity — ensuring that emissions and energy data from different sources are consistently processed, spatially and sectorally disaggregated, and ready for use across the broader assessment pipeline.
- Work with IAM scenario databases/ensembles (IPCC/IAMC-style formats, variable conventions, metadata, units) to produce policy-relevant indicators across emissions, energy, and key sectoral metrics.
- Support equity/fair-share and just-transition assessments of national pathways (e.g., effort sharing / fair-share ranges) and fossil fuel phaseout plans.
- Design and implement scenario diagnostics and quality checks (variable/region mappings, unit consistency, outlier detection, completeness checks) and document assumptions transparently.
- Develop and maintain reproducible, collaborative Python pipelines for scenario ingestion, cleaning, harmonisation, and analysis (version control, testing, documentation).
- Contribute to shared team infrastructure (e.g., data warehouse, standardised datasets, mappings, metadata practices) and improve internal standards for scenario handling.
- Participate in the development of methods and approaches to define and evaluate global, national and sectoral climate action.