Assistant Project Scientist - Berkeley Carbon Trading Project

The University of California, Berkeley is hiring an Assistant Project Scientist for the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. This role focuses on researching and engaging with policymakers and market actors regarding carbon trading and offset programs, particularly in wetland and mangrove restoration. Responsibilities include conducting research, writing, and developing policy briefs while monitoring market trends to ensure research findings influence policy and market dynamics.
The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project (BCTP) is a coordinated research and engagement program dedicated to studying the effectiveness of carbon trading and offset programs and ensuring that this understanding informs program design. The new Project Scientist will focus on the engagement elements of our work through research, analysis, writing, and engagement with policymakers and market actors. This role will both keep tabs on what is happening in the policy and market spaces to help guide our research so that it’s most relevant, and also work to make sure that our research findings influence policy and the market. This involves research on market evolution including corporate interest in a shift to contributions approaches, keeping up on market and policy dynamics and changes, helping our research teams engage with market actors during our research and leading some of that engagement, and engaging with market actors, policymakers, and media after we release our results.

The first year of this position will focus on BCTP’s workstream on wetlands and mangrove restoration. As the carbon market wrestles with chronic quality concerns, many high-profile standards bodies, credit purchasers, and policies are shifting attention from emissions reductions to durable carbon removals.

Wetland/mangrove restoration has tremendous potential for durable removals, and is also an important way to protect coasts and coastal communities from rising seas and to protect and expand coastal ecosystems. Yet less than a dozen of the thousands of projects on the voluntary carbon market that have generated credits support wetland restoration. The purpose of BCTP’s wetland restoration project is to assess the quality of existing carbon crediting methodologies and concretely envision approaches to bringing private funds into this important project type. The new engagement-focused project scientist will lead the team’s exploration of how to turn our assessments of the outcomes of current programs and current funding needs into practical recommendations for carbon finance structures to direct private contributions to accurately quantified well-designed wetland restoration activities. The role also involves communicating our recommendations, and the reasons for them founded in previous BCTP research, to policymakers and market actors.

Key Tasks

Research & Writing
• Conduct research on corporate climate contributions/offsetting strategies, compliance programs, and carbon market trends, with a focus on contributions-style approaches.
• Perform research on finance mechanisms for wetland restoration.
• Write commentaries for journal publication.

Policy Engagement
• Draft public comments on carbon market governance, including within the NGO space (SBTi, GHGp, ISO, ETA, VCMI, ICVCM, et al.).
• As appropriate, engage with policymakers on emerging regulatory frameworks, including carbon credit quality standards, contributions program structures, and compliance market design.
• Develop policy briefs.

Market Engagement
• Monitor trends in voluntary and compliance markets, including corporate purchasing strategies and policy shifts, and emerging technologies and approaches for offset developers.
• Lead and support our team’s engagement with corporate supporters of nature-based solutions.

Media & Public Commentary
• Support media engagements on carbon markets and offsets.
• Contribute expert insights to journalists covering carbon finance.
• Represent BCTP at relevant events, conferences, etc.
• Manage BCTP’s blog.

Fundraising & Institutional Growth
• Support project fundraising efforts.
• Lead on select funding outreach efforts related to carbon market and alternative contributions approaches governance and policy.