Climate Innovation Coordinator

About Asian Disaster Preparedness Center

ADPC is an intergovernmental regional organization with a vision to reduce disaster and climate risk impacts on communities and countries in Asia and the Pacific by working with governments, development partners, international organizations, NGOs, civil society, private sector, media, and other key stakeholders. Established in 1986 as a technical capacity building center, ADPC has grown and diversified its expertise across social and physical sciences to support sustainable solutions for risk reduction across a broad range of specialist areas. With over 100 staff from 19 different nationalities and a wide range of professional expertise from atmospheric scientists to social scientists with experiences from all levels of engagement typically required for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Resilience (CR) in an effective manner. ADPC is a competent regional resource center and has seven thematic departments: ADPC Academy, Risk Governance, Climate Resilience, Urban Resilience, Health Risk Management, Preparedness for Response and Recovery, Geospatial Information. These are supported by Finance, Human Resources and Administration, and Strategic Planning departments. In addition to the departments, ADPC works on three cross-cutting themes: Gender and Diversity, Poverty and Livelihoods, and Regional and Transboundary Cooperation through permanent working committees. ADPC Strategy 2020 guides the organization in providing comprehensive risk reduction support to countries and communities in Asia and the Pacific. ADPC recognizes the importance of examining the linkages between disaster risk management, poverty reduction, gender equality, sustainability, rights-based approaches, climate change and regional cooperation. For details please refer to ADPC website at http://www.adpc.net/

Background

Disasters take a huge toll on the development agenda of SAR countries. Between 2000 and 2017, disasters in South Asia incurred estimated damages of US$ 149.27 billion. Public expenditure is under stress by the repeated need to reallocate capital budgets away from long term development planning and towards reconstruction activities in post-disaster environments. For example, since 2005, Pakistan has suffered losses on the order of US$ 16 billion due to natural disasters. In Bangladesh, 2007 Cyclone Sidr resulted in damages and losses of US$1.7 billion, or 2.6 per cent of GDP. To increase resilience and achieve climate commitments, there is a need for a transformational shift towards policies and institutions that enable climate resilient investments. Investing in more resilient infrastructure is both profitable and urgent as disruptions are extremely costly for governments, households and private sector and large ongoing investments in infrastructure assets will have long-lasting repercussions as poor maintenance and natural disasters result in a vulnerable stock. With the financial support from the World Bank Group, ADPC will be implementing a five years’ project, titled “Climate Adaptation and Resilience Project for South Asia” (CARE). The project aims to create an enabling environment for climate resilience policies and investments across South Asia. This objective will be achieved through enhanced regional cooperation and knowledge exchange for climate resilience and adaptation and mainstreaming of resilience and adaptation in national policies, plans and investments. The key target sectors under this project such as agriculture, transport, water, planning, and finance will be piloted in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.

ADPC is entrusted for the component 2 of the project focusing on Enabling Climate Resilient Policies and Standards for Development with the following sub-components:

1. Advisory services for policy and investment interventions;
2. Promoting Climate Resilient Design and Standards
3. Implementation Support to Climate-Risk Management Solutions: Capacity building and technical support;
4. Innovation for Climate Adaptation and Resilience.

The sub-component “Innovation for Climate Adaptation and Resilience” is implemented as part of the World Bank’s Program for Asia Resilience to Climate Change Multi Donor Trust Fund (PARCC TF Grant). This is financed by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO-UK) which will crowdsource innovative and disruptive technology solutions for resilience through grant awards, matchmaking, and pilot-testing. This involves a number of actions such as the formulation of resilience innovation, call for proposal, judging, award, presentation of results, documentation, and outreach in phases and is expected to stimulate innovators to explore more climate-smart approaches to development in the region.

Resilience innovation is further divided into two categories:

1. Climate Innovation Challenge (CIC) will promote innovation in the South Asia Region (SAR) through the award of grants to eligible and qualifying innovators. This would include problem statements around Climate Data and information including short-term EWS and longer-term climate outlook data. The Climate Innovation Challenge will, therefore, aim to facilitate innovative solutions for their application and scale-up across different sectors, and tiers (national, sub- national and local/community) for greater impact.
2. TechEmerge Resilience India Challenge will be undertaken in India in collaboration with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) as a technical partner with an aim to crowd in private-sector expertise and market-based innovation for resilience through the use of disruptive technologies to address climate and disaster resilience challenges. After a comprehensive needs assessment, an open global call will be launched to source relevant proven well- tested solutions, that can be customized for the region. With the support of a network of technical advisors, the most relevant innovators will be selected and matched with beneficiary users to adopt and implement local pilot projects and form new partnerships. CARE project will provide grant funding to winning innovators and provide appropriate support for field testing/pilot activities.

Statement of Intent

The Climate Innovation Coordinator is expected to provide coordination support to the activities under the Climate Innovation Challenge by providing technical and adminiatrative assitance. The position will be home-based. Note: It is not the intent of this Terms of Reference to cover every aspect of the position requirements, rather highlight the most important areas of personal and joint responsibilities.

Duties and Responsibilities

The Consultant shall be responsible to perform the following tasks:

• Coordinate activities and support the Grants Management Specialist and the implementation monitoring firm, in the CIC implementation process in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka;
• Provide technical and administrative support in carrying out activities by consolidating inputs from countries into quality reports that feed into the CIC process;
• Assist in organizing events along with processing essential documents based on ADPC administrative policies;
• Support the Grants Management Specialist in monitoring the progress of grant holders and evaluating their outputs, in addition to providing support towards recording and documenting the key learnings from the different steps of the implementation process;
• Support the Grants Management Specialist to prepare progress reports and other related tasks;
• Support in making necessary documentation for different regional and country-level meetings and consultations;
• Assist the Grants Management Specialist in conducting country-level consultations and prepare country consultation reports;
• Assist in preparing information and updates for the website;
• Assist in knowledge and information management throughout the implementation process of the CIC;
• Perform any other task assigned by the supervisor.

Qualifications

Education

A Bachelor's Degree in Commerce, Business Administration, Economics, Computer Science or any other related qualifications.

Work Experience

• At least 3 years of experience in program support, coordination and technical documentation. Some experience related to climate change or disaster risk management or technology ecosystem is preferred.
• Experience in information and knowledge management;
• Extensive experience in using MS Office Suite;
• Some experience in statistics and using excel for assessments.

Functional Competencies

• Ability to respect timeframes and meet deadlines;
• Strong desire to learn; undertake new challenges; must be a creative problem-solver; must have self-confidence; willingness to work hard.

Language Proficiency

Excellent English proficiency in communication, presentation skills and report writing.

Reporting Relationships

The Consultant will report to the Project Director, CARE for South Asia. The consultant will work in close coordination with the Grants Management Specialist on a day-to-day basis and also closely coordinate with the Project Implementation Unit.