Water Risk Intern for the Vaal River Basin

WRI’s Markets & Enterprise Program seeks a full-time, energetic intern to join the Water Risk Team. The Markets and Enterprise Program seeks to direct the flow of capital towards sustainable businesses, doing research and building tools to assess and integrate environmental risk and opportunities into business strategy and investment decisions. Water scarcity, partly driven by climate change, is an area where the Program seeks to provide company managers and investors with more detailed and actionable information.

The intern will play a key research role in the Aqueduct project, which measures and maps companies’ and investors’ water risk.  

More specifically, the intern will analyze trends in different drivers of water-related business risks in the Vaal river basin in South Africa

Aqueduct will be an online database and suite of applications to quantify, aggregate and map the physical, regulatory and socio-economic components of water risks. Companies and their investors are increasingly recognizing the importance of these risks leveraging their key competencies to decrease their water dependency and/or increase their water security. Aqueduct is not only an online global database with localized water risk information, but also seeks to become the global standard for measuring and reporting geographic water risk.

Aqueduct will enable:

• Companies to better map and manage water risk for their global operations and supply chains at the local level,
• Governments and organizations to develop more effective investment programs and policy reforms, and
• Investors to more accurately assess companies’ water risks.

The intern will play a key role in expanding Aqueduct to river basins around the world, starting with the Vaal in South Africa.