Applied/Senior Researcher - Climate

We’re looking for an Applied/Senior Researcher to work on our Research team, which identifies and evaluates high-impact funding opportunities (HIFOs) to enable our members to give as effectively as possible. Our members are high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) who use our HIFO recommendations (across a range of cause areas, including the long-term future of humanity, helping the current generation and animal welfare) to guide their giving.

Since 2017, we have rigorously evaluated climate change interventions and our work has been featured in the NYT, Vox, Volts, 80,000 Hours, and Prospect Magazine, among others. You can read a recent update on our work here and you can read more about our research here and the grantmaking direction you would contribute to here.

We’re now looking to further scale our research-based grantmaking program and the impact of our Climate Change Fund.

This is a fantastic opportunity to influence tens of millions of dollars in some of the most high-impact climate opportunities globally.
You’ll conduct:

* Intervention area and landscaping investigations: Investigations into particular strategies to address climate change (such as avoiding carbon lock-in via affecting climate finance) or into questions of relevance to prioritization (such as the shape of expected climate damage).
* Framework and tool-building: Building and maintaining quantitative tools to guide decision-making utilizing data from the scientific and scenario literatures (in tools like R, Python, Guesstimate, and Google Sheets, some flexibility - please don’t hesitate to apply).
* Funding opportunity investigations: Individual investigations into promising funding opportunities to see if they meet our bar for recommendation. You’ll make funding opportunity recommendations and write them up.
* Shallow investigations: Internal investigations of less than a week into a particular problem area or methodological question relevant to our research, such as policy dynamics in different countries, emissions trends in different sectors, the impact of global warming potential (GWP) metrics on prioritization choices, or the likely curvature of climate damage.

Some projects similar to those you might work on in your first few months, depending on your existing skills and those you want to build:
* Helping to get better traction on comparing different promising theories of change, such as innovation advocacy and avoiding carbon lock-in by reviewing scientific literature, talking to experts and building quantitative back-of-the-envelope models.
* Developing cost-effectiveness models of specific promising interventions, such as strengthening clean energy entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging economies or accelerating and de-risking the adoption of alternative proteins.
* Evaluating specific funding opportunities and forming views about the expected impact of additional funding.
* Investigating blindspots of current climate philanthropy and action by comparing global decarbonization priorities with existing efforts.