Water jobs, career, vacancy and employment opportunities from Global Waternet

SOCIO-HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING OF DROUGHT ADAPTATION IN THE NETHERLANDS

		Employer: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
		Job location: Amsterdam Netherlands
		Apply before: 01 May 2022

Summary

Job location

Job application

Find more information about this job

Job description

Are you interested in finding solutions to drought in the Netherlands by modelling effects of farm-level water storage at larger scales? Do you enjoy interdisciplinary research and working with public and private stakeholders? Please apply at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

PHD SOCIO-HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING OF DROUGHT ADAPTATION IN THE NETHERLANDS

Location: Amsterdam
FTE: 0,8 - 1
JOB DESCRIPTION
In the Netherlands, climate change is leading to drier and warmer springs and summers with accentuated dry spells as well as more intense rainfall events. To make agricultural systems more robust to these fluctuations, farmers and water managers at different scales have to transition from a paradigm based on quickly discharging water through drainage, to a more flexible system based on water storage that can better deal with droughts. The UPWAS project aims at co-developing interdisciplinary insights and tools that support farmers, Waterboards, Provincial Governments and other public and private stakeholders in the Netherlands in the process of upscaling private and collective water storage for robust agricultural systems. We will do this based on three real case studies that are currently trying to store more water locally to improve the regional water system.

We are looking for a PhD candidate who can develop an agent-based hydrological model to investigate how farmers’ behaviour on water storage affects the hydrology and what the trade-offs and benefits are of upscaling these water storage measures. The PhD project will focus on analyzing how drivers such as technological development (i.e., water storage options) and socio-economic and climatic change affect decision making of a farmer population and how this will affect the hydrology at landscape and regional levels.
This PhD candidate will collaborate closely with two other researchers (PhD and postdoc) based in Wageningen to investigate the feedbacks between hydrology, climate, crop yield and socio-economic behaviours with the aim to support decision-makers by demonstrating the effects of decisions on different sectors, decision pathways and lock-in conditions.

Your duties
Collect qualitative data on agricultural (drought) management, farmer’s decision making on water storage, socio-economic conditions, and current and future governance and policies in case of different adaptation actions in the project living labs in the Netherlands;
Integrate existing hydrological, agricultural and agent-based models to simulate the interactions between farmers using water storage and hydrological systems based on different behavioural theories;
Co-develop a coupled hydrological-ABM model for the specific cases with the stakeholders in the field;
Write a PhD thesis consisting of 4 scientific papers;
Work with other PhD, postdocs, and colleagues of the project consortium (existing of academic, private and public parties) and contribute to project reporting;
Attend regional and national meetings;
Contribute to the teaching and supervising activities at VU Amsterdam.
REQUIREMENTS
MSc degree (must be obtained before the end of the summer 2022) in hydrology (or similar, e.g. earth, climate, or environmental sciences, physical geography, civil/environmental engineering);
Experience with hydrological modelling and a demonstrable interest in socio-hydrological models for modelling human-water dynamics (experience with agent-based models is an advantage);
Good programming skills (preferably in Python, or willing to learn Python);
Demonstrable interest in qualitative data collection (experience with participatory methods is an advantage);
Strong interest in interdisciplinary research, combining climate and environmental sciences with social science concepts, methods and data;
Good oral and written skills in English and Dutch (or basic knowledge of Dutch with willingness to learn in the first year, as communication with farmers will be in Dutch);
Strong collaboration and communication skills to work in a larger multi-disciplinary team, including with policymakers, private sector and civil society stakeholders;
Good writing and presentation skills, as evidenced by e.g. reports, published peer-reviewed papers, blogs.