PhD Position on The Climate Expectation Gap: Perspectives on Future Risks by Households

Join our ERC SPHINX Team to elicit how people and businesses think about climate risks, if their choices lead to stranded assets, and how they shape climate adaptation. Help uncover when behavioral biases ignite systemic impacts to uncover levers towards climate-resilient policies!

PhD Position on The Climate Expectation Gap: Perspectives on Future Risks by Households

This 4-year fully funded PhD position is part of the ERC Consolidator project “Systemic physical climate risk in complex adaptive economies” (SPHINX), made possible thanks to the European Research Council. Join our ERC SPHINX Team to elicit how people and businesses think about climate risks, if their choices lead to stranded assets, and how they shape climate adaptation. Help uncover when behavioral biases ignite systemic impacts to uncover levers towards climate-resilient policies!

Background:

Globally, climate change already manifests via physical risks – damages from floods, storms, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, and sea-level rise. Concerns are rising that these risks may become systemic, when local damage cannot be contained and adversely affects the entire socio-economic system. Usually, physical climate risk assessments overlay hazard probability, exposure and vulnerability to estimate future damage. These estimates linearly extrapolate historic data and assume that markets efficiently capitalize information about climate risks. This leads to gradual adjustments of economic actors with perfect future insight, and thus to reactions and pricing of unprecedented climate-induced hazards as if they are simple variations on past experience. This approach is criticized for underestimating the true costs of climate change (e.g., at just 1-3% of GDP loss even under severe scenarios), impeding climate action.

Instead, analysis of systemic risks embraces complex interactions among elements/agents, adjusting expectations, mechanisms of contagion dynamics, feedback loops, and non-linear tipping of system dynamics. The SPHINX research program aims to fundamentally advance simulation methods and consolidate novel data to understand how systemic physical climate risks affect the wider socio-economic system, and to explore strategies to curtail their spiraling costs. The project focuses on Europe, with a detailed analysis of three selected case-study regions. Methodologically, SPHINX embraces five pillars, ranging from data collection to agent-based and computable general equilibrium modeling, led by five team members. The current PhD position focuses on developing surveys and conducting statistical analysis of the unique microdata collected from households and firms across three countries.

Job Description:

The successful candidate will work within the SPHINX research team to explore when and how households and firms consider (long-term) climate risks in their economic decisions, such as buying a house or investing in business activities, and how they think about climate adaptation investments. To explore how these decisions depend on people’s expectations about climate physical risks, the candidate will develop theory-grounded questionnaires to be administered across three countries using online surveys. During this 4-year-long project, the PhD student will build on the latest progress in surveys of households and businesses (e.g., regarding risk perceptions, private and public climate adaptation decisions, and traditional expectations measurements), grounded in a range of theories from different social sciences. Synthesizing and extending the knowledge on socio-behavioral factors affecting such long-term (economic) decisions and people’s views on a fair distribution of adaptation funding will be essential here. Most of this PhD project will focus on the statistical analysis of these rich cross-country datasets, also examining whether firms’ decisions differ from households. The goal of this data collection and analysis research is to identify where and how real expectations regarding uncertain climate risks deviate from perfectly rational long-term expectations, and which socio-behavioral biases are most critical in facilitating climate risks to become systemic. This data collection and analysis work will benefit from the computational agent-based and macroeconomic modeling carried out by other team members.

Job Requirements

• MSc in Environmental Studies, Geography, Economics, Psychology, or related quantitative social sciences.
• Knowledge of statistics and basics of data analysis.
• Capacity to perform statistical programming, ideally with R or Python (alternatively with SPSS or Stata).
• Previous experience with designing questionnaires, choice experiments, carrying out surveys or other data collection efforts is beneficial.
• Domain knowledge in the field of climate change, adaptation, risk assessment, or global environmental change in general is an advantage.
• Solid problem-solving skills and capacity to take the initiative.
• Fluency in written and spoken English. For more details, please check the Graduate Schools Admission Requirements. Dutch is not obligatory; TU Delft offers opportunities to learn the language if desired.

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology)

Delft University of Technology is built on strong foundations. As creators of the world-famous Dutch waterworks and pioneers in biotech, TU Delft is a top international university combining science, engineering and design. It delivers world class results in education, research and innovation to address challenges in the areas of energy, climate, mobility, health and digital society. For generations, our engineers have proven to be entrepreneurial problem-solvers, both in business and in a social context.

Faculty Technology, Policy & Management

The Faculty of TPM provides an important contribution to solving complex technical-social issues, such as energy transition, mobility, digitalisation, water management and (cyber) security. TPM does this with its excellent education and research at the intersection of technology, society and policy. We combine insights from both engineering and social sciences as well as the humanities. TPM develops robust models and designs, is internationally oriented and has an extensive network of knowledge institutions, companies, social organisations and governments.

Conditions of Employment

• Doctoral candidates will be offered a 4-year period of employment in principle, but in the form of 2 employment contracts. An initial 1.5 year contract with an official go/no go progress assessment within 15 months. Followed by an additional contract for the remaining 2.5 years assuming everything goes well and performance requirements are met.
• Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, increasing from €3059 - €3881 gross per month, from the first year to the fourth year based on a fulltime contract (38 hours), plus 8% holiday allowance and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%.
• As a PhD candidate you will be enrolled in the TU Delft Graduate School. The TU Delft Graduate School provides an inspiring research environment with an excellent team of supervisors, academic staff and a mentor. The Doctoral Education Programme is aimed at developing your transferable, discipline-related and research skills.
• The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, discounts on health insurance, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged.

Additional information

For more information about this position, please contact: Prof Dr. T.Filatova, e-mail: t.filatova@tudelft.nl.