Job #: req38738 Organization: World Bank Sector: Disaster Risk Management Grade: EC2 Term Duration: 1 year 0 months Recruitment Type: Local Recruitment Location: Berlin,Germany Required Language(s): English Preferred Language(s): French, Spanish or Portuguese Closing Date: 10/23/2026 (MM/DD/YYYY) at 11:59pm UTC
Description
At the World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), you’ll join a diverse, global community working across cultures, disciplines, and borders to address the world’s most pressing development challenges. With 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the decade ahead, the challenge of job creation has never been greater. Through partnerships across 145 countries and more than 182 offices worldwide, we work with governments, private sector, development partners and other stakeholders to invest in people, strengthen markets, and deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that generate more and better jobs and improve lives. For more information, visit International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The WBG Infrastructure Vertical provides public and private solutions to operational teams and clients across the WBG to produce scalable impact. Its mandate is to deliver knowledge for impact to support the WBG to achieve its goals in support of our mission and specifically: providing guidance on creating more and better jobs by: (i) supporting foundational infrastructure and human capital, (ii) policy environment, and (iii) enabling and mobilizing private sector capital. With 60 years of experience, the WBG is poised to support the sector becoming an engine of growth and jobs through improving policies and governance, foundational infrastructure and private sector investments. The WBG lending in the sector is expected to grow substantially. The Infrastructure VPU’s objectives in driving outcomes include replicating and scaling effective solutions, enhancing thought leadership and innovation, and delivering timely knowledge to client teams. For more information: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/infrastructure.
Disaster Management, Solutions & Impact Unit (KIUSD) supports low and middle-income countries to understand, manage, and reduce their risks from natural hazards and climate change. Within KIUSD, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) umbrella trust fund is a global partnership that helps low- and middle-income countries better understand and reduce their vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change. GFDRR supports analytics and technical assistance to the most vulnerable countries and communities where it will have the greatest positive impact. As a donor-funded program, GFDRR consults regularly with donors and actively strives to maintain and develop new partnerships for increased impact. For more information: https://www.gfdrr.org/en.
Please note this position is financed by a Trust Fund and renewal is contingent upon availability of funding, in addition to other factors, including but not limited to business needs, staff performance and skills fit.
The Data Scientist will support the World Bank Task Teams through the development and applications of tools to inform technical assistance, analytics, operations, client dialogues and capacity building, centered primarily around the Resilient Infrastructure thematic area, but with a secondary focus on the Jobs, and disaster risk management agendas. The hiring of an Extended Term Consultant will help GFDRR deliver demand-driven applications of this suite of tools repeatedly, at scale, and at a low marginal cost. The exact distribution of the ETC’s time across the various tasks will depend on operational demand and internal priorities aligned with the following five tasks.
Task 1: Urban mobility, accessibility, disruptions from hazards, and road criticality
The consultant will respond to task team requests to assess accessibility to employment and other key services in urban areas, as well as quantifying the mobility disruption impacts from hazards. The consultant will also identify most critical road segments, those who would benefit most from resilience-building investments to minimize infrastructure service degradation. Where socioeconomic data is available (poverty, gender,…), the consultant will also quantify the heterogeneity in service and the additional impacts from disasters. This work builds on previous efforts (see here, here, and here) and is expected to be responsive to task team requests channeled through the SPARC initiative (Smart Parcel Atlas for Resilient Cities) but also through more traditional cross-support requests.
Task 2: Resilience Infrastructure for development and applications of the “Infrascan”
The consultant will support the Resilient Infrastructure thematic area in GFDRR in developing and applying the recent “Infrascan” tool that produces multi-hazard infrastructure asset exposure, vulnerability, and risk assessments. We anticipate significant demand for the outputs of this tool both from recipients of GFDRR Resilient Infrastructure JIT grants and from Task Teams working on the new wave of CCDRs. The ETC will play a key role in responding to the task teams through the production of “Infrascan” notes, and support to task teams in interpreting results and conveying them in the case of policy dialogues. On the tool development side, the ETC will work on refining the tool; adding hazards to the list currently covered, including possibly droughts, extreme heat and wildfires; and contributing to build a bottom-up repository of local datasets covering infrastructure assets, hazards, vulnerability curves, and asset cost estimates. The Consultant would also support benchmarking and calibrating Infrascan against other published disaster risk profiles.
Task 3: Transport Network Resilience Planning Decision-Support Tool (HARMA)
The ETC will become familiar with the HARMA model (Hazard and Risk Multi-Regional Assessment Tool), which aims 1/ at quantifying both the direct damages and indirect costs from transport disruptions from hazards at the national/regional level; 2/ identifying a series of technical solutions to mitigate these (e.g. drainage), and 3/ at performing an economic appraisal of these identified solutions. The HARMA tool was developed by the transport global unit and is used jointly with GFDRR. The ETC will support evaluating the feasibility of integrating the HARMA tool with other tools/assessments such as buildings focused Physical Climate Risk Appraisal Methodology (PCRAM) to present a joint risk analytics product. The ETC’s role will be to raise awareness of the existence of this tool, tailoring its contribution to the transport corridors agenda and respond to requests for its use by task teams.
Task 4: Tracking progress and identifying policy priorities through socio-economic resilience estimates.
The Unbreakable model (Middelanis et al. 2025, Hallegatte et al. 2017) is a micro-simulation model that aims at quantifying the consumption and welfare implications of disasters, i.e. moving beyond the $ value of asset damages, with a specific attention to socio-economic disparities. It has been used initially as an advocacy tool, and in more recent years in the contexts of technical assistance and WB operations, allowing the data-driven discussion for adaptive social protection programs (Middelanis et al, 2026). Requests for country-level applications have come from the SPJ and Poverty GPs in particular, and there is also appetite for applications in the contexts of FCV settings. The Consultant would also support updating the Unbreakable website and requests for applications to GFDRR’s disaster risk financing/risk reduction work. The ETC will be the main modeler in charge of the new applications of the Unbreakable model in response to task team requests.
Task 5: Developing the jobs/Disaster Management nexus
Building on ongoing work, the ETC will contribute to the improved understanding and quantification of the Disaster Management/jobs nexus. This work will quantify the job loss impacts of disasters and the contribution of Disaster risk management and Resilient Infrastructure in mitigating these. Beyond the analytics, the ETC is expected to contribute to raising the awareness of the importance of Disaster risk management in the jobs agenda. Under this task the ETC will also work on practical guidance to quantify job creation from World Bank DRM operations, thereby contributing to filling an important knowledge gap in World Bank operational corporate reporting. In addition, and time allowing, the ETC will familiarize herself/himself with a macro-economic model, currently under development, that assesses the macro-economic growth penalty from background disaster risk. The objective will be to work on tailoring and streamlining the model to produce insights that are useful for policy dialogues and technical assistance efforts with a quick turnaround time.
Beyond the workstreams identified under Tasks 1 through 5, the Extended Term Consultant will contribute to producing tailored analytics, talking points for management, reviews of draft reports, papers, and grant proposals, among other potential tasks.Attach the TOR below OR you may insert the selection criteria here. To paste from Word use the "Paste from Word" icon above.
Selection Criteria
For information about WBG Core Competencies, please visit: https://bit.ly/2kbIA7O.
World Bank Group Core Competencies
As per WBG policy, an Extended Term (ET) appointment is subject to a lifetime maximum of three (3) years. Former and current ET staff who have completed or are in the process of completing their third-year ET appointment are not eligible for future ET appointments.
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