PhD position in Ecosystem Services
CeSAM is looking for PhD Research Fellow in Ecosystem Services, to measure and understand patterns of ecosystem service demand across Norwegian society.
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The overall aim of this PhD project is to measure the relative demand for different ecosystem services, including both material and non-material services, across Norwegian society and to identify the social drivers of demand for these services.
The project is part of UiBs Centre for Sustainable Management. A major goal of CESAM is to develop NCPNorge, a widely applicable model that will predict the social impacts of ecosystem change across the whole of Norway. Such an initiative is a major undertaking, and the project needs to be completed in several steps. The first of these, and a major pre-requisite, is the main aim of this project: to quantify which of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) are most demanded by different stakeholders in Norway, in a social-ecological research project. This project will also address the lack of information regarding what drives the demand for ecosystem services, a neglected element of their management.
To address these goals the proposed PhD project would conduct in-person workshops with a wide range of senior local stakeholders in each major social-ecological region of Norway. This would be followed by a larger social survey of a much larger sample of stakeholders from throughout the country. Additional data will be collected to understand the social and cultural drivers of these demand patterns. Further, existing data measuring preferences for land use and preservation can be analysed, including national public opinion survey data from the Norwegian Citizen Panel and the Panels of Elected Representatives and Public Administrators. The balance of large-scale survey and interview work will depend on the profile of the successful candidate.
The proposed project will involve interdisciplinary collaboration across the CESAM initiative and build the foundations of large-scale research platform, while also providing insightful and societally relevant research in its own right. The research fellow will be primarily supervised by Professor Peter Manning (BIO), with additional support from Associate Professor Endre Tvinnereim (Dept. of Government), Professor Vigdis Vandvik (BIO) and Professor Inger Måren (BIO).
Application deadline: 1 December 2023.
For more information and to apply, visit the advertisement on Jobbnorge.