Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Footprint Scenarios

Are you interested in quantifying and understanding environmental footprints of sectors and products? Then join our environmental science group for a three-year postdoctoral research position focused on quantifying environmental and biodiversity footprints of investment portfolios and food consumption. You will be part of an international and interactive group of researchers dedicated to solving environmental sustainability challenges.
You will be part of the Horizon Europe RAINFOREST project involving several European universities and international industrial partners. The overall aim of the RAINFOREST project is to contribute to enabling, upscaling, and accelerating transformative change in Europe towards reducing climate and biodiversity impacts of major food and biomass value chains. Key aspects of RAINFOREST include i) the development and quantification of consumption, production and investment scenarios and ii) the quantification of environmental footprints associated with these scenarios based on life cycle assessment and multi-regional input-output methodologies.

You will evaluate the environmental (land use and climate change) footprints of alternative investment portfolios and of alternative European food consumption scenarios. For the investment portfolios, you will develop a method to quantify current and prospective environmental pressures of companies. For the European food consumption, you will develop consumption scenarios and subsequently quantify the environmental pressures associated with food production corresponding to the consumption scenarios. To this end, you will employ life cycle models as well as multi-regional input-output models to quantify environmental pressures along entire supply chains of companies and industries. Ultimately, you will link the environmental footprints associated with investment portfolios and European food consumption scenarios to existing biodiversity impact assessment models that quantify relationships between these pressures and biodiversity responses (e.g. change in species abundance or richness as a response to land use and as a response to climate change).