Research Consultant - Environment Impact Assessment - J-PAL South Asia

Education: Master’s in Civil or Environmental Sciences / Engineering with minimum 2 years’ relevant work experience

Start Date: February 2025

Language Requirement: English, Hindi/ Marathi

Length of Commitment: minimum commitment of 1 year for this position.

The Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a research centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which collaborates with governments, NGOs and international development organizations to inform policy with sound evidence. At India, the J-PAL South Asia office is housed at Institute of Financial Research and Management (IFMR) in Chennai.

J-PAL seeks qualified applicants for the position of Environment Consultant for a project on green enterprises in India. The position offers an opportunity to gain first-hand field experience in an organization undertaking cutting-edge development research in the environment and business domain.

Project and role description

The green accelerator project is being implemented by TechnoServe across green enterprises in India. J-PAL South Asia is the Monitoring and Evaluation partner of this accelerator program. This project is aimed at measuring the financial and environmental performance of green enterprises over a period of time, that are a part of the accelerator program.

The 400+ Small Green Businesses (SGBs) part of this program sell a range of ‘green’ products and services, primarily in the sectors of Waste Management, Water purification/conservation, Forestry, Textile, or Agri-tech. For J-PAL, it is important to identify the quantum of carbon emissions that these green businesses mitigate per year, depending on their sales volumes. If the start-up does not have impact in terms of carbon, the quantification has to be done in terms of other metrics such as biodiversity impact or the amount of water preserved.

We are looking for a consultant to help us estimate the carbon emissions offset (or biodiversity metrics) for these businesses, and also the emissions produced in their own operations, through Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 calculations. This has to be done using primary data collected by the field team using SurveyCTO, while also advising improvements in the measurement tool itself. The role will act as an expert and guide within the team, regarding all things related to environmental impact.

The job responsibilities will include (not exhaustive):

·    Completely understand the measurement framework and questions already being used by the team, before starting the calculations

·     Engage with entrepreneurs who are part of the program through online calls, especially firms which are complex in nature, in order to understand their products and services, and identify which measurement framework can be used

·     Identify and evaluate carbon intensive counterfactuals for green products and/or services sold by each business part of the program

·     Identify unit emissions for the counterfactuals where these are not available with the team.

·     Research cradle-to-gate or cradle-to-grave emissions factors using secondary research, if not available on the internal project database

·     Work closely with the team to arrive at emissions avoided emissions for green products compared to conventional products.

·     Quality check and suggest improvements on the calculations already done since the project inception

·     Maintain strong documentation of the procedures and learnings.

·     Create reports in the assigned format for sending to the entrepreneurs

·    Check-in calls with the field team after their site visit, to assess data completion and flagging the pending data points

·     Follow-up with entrepreneurs over emails/messages to send pending data

·  Training/Capacity Building of the field team on impact calculations, so that straightforward calculations can be taken up by them

·     Suggest areas of improvement so that businesses can increase their net impact

·  Reporting to Research Associate and Research Manager on all the above mention activities

Desired Qualifications and Experience:

Required

·    Master’s in Civil or Environmental Sciences / Engineering / Statistics with 2-5 years’ relevant work experience

·     Thorough understanding of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 measurements

·     Environmental Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of a product

·  Ability to deep-dive into a topic to understand the conventional process, and the differentiating aspect of the green business

·     Strong analytical skills and ability to interpret environment data

·     Prior experience in environmental auditing/measurement

·     Excellent communication skills in English and in Hindi

·     Flexible, self-motivating, and able to manage multiple tasks efficiently within a team

Preferred

·     Understanding of emission sources in industrial and manufacturing processes

·    Familiarity with sustainability reporting frameworks such as GRI, DJSI, CDP, TCFD, SASB, SDGs.

·     Initiate to contribute, learn, and ideate new solutions in a dynamic team environment

·     Familiarity with data collection and SurveyCTO will be an advantage

Duration: We are looking for a minimum commitment of 1 year for this position

Compensation: Commensurate to the experience and matching the best of standards adopted by the industry or other similar organizations for similar roles.

Location: Remote – anywhere in India, but with excellent internet connectivity so as to regularly connect with the team and do secondary research on one’s own