PhD position in urban water management with nature-based solutions

The Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) is recruiting a PhD candidate to work on nature-based solutions for urban water management in Northern latitudes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are solutions inspired and supported by nature and provide environmental, social and economic benefits. They are used to an increasing extent in urban stormwater management or urban regeneration projects. As NbS can have multiple benefits and fulfill different purposes it is often a challenge to design, scale and place them in a way that several of their benefits are optimized, often in small, confined urban areas.

About the PhD project

The objective of the announced PhD project is to contribute to an interdisciplinary project on NbS and with a specific focus to develop algorithms that allow for multi-objective optimization of NbS. Optimization criteria might consider location, size and type of nature-based solutions, pollution and stormwater retention, biological traits, implementation and maintenance costs and other benefits/ecosystem services of nature-based solutions. Optimization approaches will identify trade-offs and synergies between different ecosystem and land use functions under current and future scenarios of land use and climate. The algorithms should be able to inform cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analysis and support placement and scaling of NbS by urban planners. It should be applied in Nordic case-studies across different spatial scales (from plot-level to catchment/landscape level). Field work might be required to gather the relevant data.

The PhD candidate is expected to cooperate with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from NIVA and practitioners working with planning and implementation of NbS. The PhD candidate will be enrolled at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Faculty of Science and Technology. 

Furthermore, the candidate will be co-supervised by a group of senior researchers at NIVA. As part of the PhD curriculum the candidate will undertake courses in relevant fields at NMBU. Emphasis is placed on developing the candidate's ability to define a problem, develop research methods, and communicate research findings within international scientific and science-policy discussions.