Eurizon.eu

Organization: Technische Universitaet Dortmund

Location: Dortmund, Germany

Field: Human geography

Requirements:

• Obtained M.Sc. diploma in the field of social, administrative or planning sciences, less than 5 years ago.
• Good English. Skills in one or more of the languages, spoken in the case study areas (French, Italian, Polish and Romanian), are desirable, but no initial condition
• Background in disaster risk research and spatial planning
It is expected, that the successful candidate will participate in all meetings and workshops organized by the CHANGES research consortium – related additional funding will be available. The candidate must also be willing to disseminate the results within the project during the meetings, but also and in particular through presentations at conferences and contributions to scientific journals. Frequent interaction with other researchers in the CHANGES network and an attitude for scientific inter-disciplinary research are important. Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply

Abstract:

A Ph.D. position, financed by the European Community, is available within the European Marie Curie Initial Training Network “CHANGES”. The CHANGES network (Changing Hydro-meteorological Risks – as Analyzed by a New Generation of European Scientists) will develop an advanced understanding of how global changes (related to environmental and climate change as well as socio-economical change) will affect the temporal and spatial patterns of hydro-meteorological hazards and associated risks in Europe; how these changes can be assessed, modeled, and incorporated in sustainable risk management strategies, focusing on spatial planning, emergency preparedness and risk communication

Description:

Background:
‘Risk governance’ aims to enhance the disaster resilience of a society (or a region) and includes “the totality of actors, rules, conventions, processes, and mechanisms concerned with how relevant risk information is collected, analysed and communicated and management decisions are taken” (IRGC, 2005). Risk governance is therefore related to the institutional dimension of resilience, which “is determined by the degree to which the social system is capable of organising itself and the ability to increase its capacity for learning and adaptation, including the capacity to recover from a disaster” (ISDR 2002).This definition points at the three elements of risk governance: 1) risk assessment and 2) risk management that have to be embedded in a 3) risk communication process among scientists, politicians and the public (public and private stakeholders).

Objectives:
The main objective of ESR 11 is to develop integrative models and concepts that link the different phases of risk governance mentioned before though a tailor-made communication process. Moreover, the performance of existing risk governance systems should be measured based on semi-quantified indicator systems. The final outcome should be guidelines for good risk governance, tailor-made for the different study areas. Here, attention has to be paid to the given differences in characteristics of the several risk types. There are many factors known to affect an individual’s perception of risk, namely familiarity with a risk, control over the risk or its consequences, proximity in space, proximity in time, scale of the risk or general fear of the unknown (the so called “dread factor”). Apart from these factors, individual risk perception is also shaped by how the community or a certain socio-cultural milieu generally deals with a special type of risk or risky situations. An important and interesting aspect of risk perception is the variation in different cultural (regional, national) contexts, a perspective studied within the cultural risk paradigm. Thus, risk is in the different study areas differently socially constructed. Risk perception enters the risk management equation through differing estimations on, for example, which level of risk is acceptable and how much money is to be spent on prevention.

Location: The candidate will be based for 36 months at the Institute of Spatial Planning which is part of the TU Dortmund University, Germany.
Within this period, the candidate will join for 5 months at the Instytut Rozwoju Miast, located in Krakow, Poland and 5 months at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Laxenburg, Austria for project-stated knowledge transfer activities.
Supervision: The research and the PhD will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Greiving (Executive Director of IRPUD), Wiktor Glowacki from IRM and Dr. Anthony Patt at IIASA. The Ph.D. thesis will be submitted in English.
 
The contract duration is 36 months. Depending from the availability of funding, the contract might be extended up to 48 month. The salary is in accordance with the EU FP7 Marie Curie ITN regulations and will consist of salary, mobility allowance, travel allowance, career exploratory allowance and contribution to participation expenses
 
The applicants should send their CV, letter of interest/motivation and a letter of recommendation (known scholar) by E-Mail to Prof. Dr. Stefan Greiving.
For more information you can contact:
sStefan Greiving (stefan.greiving@uni-dortmund.de)

Deadline: 01-04-2011

Contacts:

Link: http://www.raumplanung.uni-dortmund.de/irpud/

Link: http://www.itc.nl/changes

Email: stefan.greiving@uni-dortmund.de

If you apply for this position please say you saw it on eurizons.eu