Job Announcements

The newly created Nature-Based Strategies Section within The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is seeking to hire a remote sensing scientist to help model, monitor, and assess California’s ecosystems towards mitigating climate change and its negative impacts.

Landscape Remote Sensing Scientist (final filing date: 4/29/2024): Duties include serving as an expert in space-based remote sensing, geospatial big-data processing, and landscape ecology. The Air Pollution Specialist (APS) Landscape Remote Sensing Scientist will assist in the development of new data products to track ecosystem change through time. These data products include carbon stocks, greenhouse gas fluxes, and other environmental metrics where appropriate. The APS will lead or assist in generating validation, calibration, and initial condition data, maps and time-series for future projection modeling of California ecosystems performed by other members of the section. The remote sensing scientist will independently, and along with other partners and contractors, develop workflows and analyses to assess spatiotemporal environmental change and attribute that change to causes. The selected candidate will also assist with other technical and policy analyses including quantifying the costs, benefits, and equity implications of natural and working lands policies and climate action. Additionally, the candidate will identify research needs that advance CARB’s understanding of cutting-edge issues in natural and working lands (NWL). The candidate will engage and collaborate with relevant stakeholders including, but not limited to, public agencies, research institutions, equity stakeholders, industry, and other CARB staff, management, and executive leadership teams. The candidate will work with other public agencies and contractors on complex joint projects. The candidate must understand the complexities of ecosystems and have a desire to use that knowledge for crafting polices and land management strategies that will change the way in which California’s lands are managed. The candidate will incorporate into their work the social equity implications of NWL policies and be able to develop strategies to ensure California's most disadvantaged and low-income communities benefit from such policies.

Note: This advertisement are only open for 10 days reflecting CARB’s priority to hire this position and should not discourage applicants.

More information about the California Air Resources Board and The Nature-Based Strategies Section:

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is the State agency responsible for reducing greenhouse gas emissions for the State of California. It is CARB’s responsibility to develop a strategy for California to be carbon neutral by 2045, implement policies to achieve carbon neutrality, and to track progress towards that objective. As part of this effort, Natural and Working Lands (NWL) are a critical component of California’s climate change mitigation strategy. NWL refers to all forests, shrublands, grasslands, croplands, deserts, wetlands, and developed lands within California’s boundaries.

The new Nature-Based Strategies sections brings together all of these lands, quantifying their socio-ecological impacts, to formulate statewide holistic nature-based climate action policy. Specifically, this section leads the integration of natural systems into California’s overall carbon neutrality and climate action efforts. The science, policy, and technical work performed in this section will influence high impact policies and programs on local, state, and national levels. To accomplish this, the Nature-Based Strategies Section uses data and scientific inference to inform and develop cutting-edge statewide nature-based policies, decisions, and programs. Work in this section includes:

1. Modeling ecosystems in California under current and future conditions to quantify the contribution of NWL to statewide carbon neutrality and to set carbon targets.
2. Developing and reporting California’s NWL carbon inventory to track progress towards carbon targets and monitor other environmental metrics.
3. Performing causal assessments identifying the driving factors to environmental change, particularly isolating the impact from nature-based management actions. 
4. Working with other State, Federal, and Local agencies to develop and implement policies that support nature-based strategies.

Visit the CalCareers Job Announcement: JC-428075-Landscape Remote Sensing Scientist (Air Pollution Specialist) for more information on job duties and how to apply.