Project Associate

Since its inception in 1972, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has been the global authority that sets the environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.

UNEP’s mission is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.

Headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, UNEP works through its divisions as well as regional, liaison and out-posted offices and a growing network of collaborating centres of excellence.

This United Nations Volunteer (UNV) assignment is part of the UNEP’s project “Informing Policy on Climate, Nature, and Pollution through strengthening national, regional, and global indicator frameworks, and environmental economic accounting on the environment” under Output C “Tools and training for capacity building to measure, monitor and report on the environment and SDGs”. The duration of the project is from 2024 to 2027.
Climate change is one of the three major environmental crises, which, in line with many other commitments, requires “providing scientific information that measures progress towards carbon neutrality and resilience and assesses the potential and risks associated with the measures applied” and “helping countries meet their transparency and other reporting obligations”, as outlined in the UNEP Medium-Term Strategy 2022–2025. The needs for climate change and disaster-related statistics must be met through improved data collection, increased use of geospatial data sources, modelling, and citizen science as well as enhanced national capacity to turn data into statistics. National statistical systems are faced with the challenge of incorporating this information into their official statistical system necessitating new and innovative approaches to national geospatial and other information management, implementing integrated evidence based decision-making solutions, and maximizing and leveraging national information systems that are tailored to individual country’s situations and circumstances. Considering the current country demand, UNEP, in collaboration with other international partners, is making efforts to provide support to countries.

The activities of this United Nations Volunteer (UNV) will contribute to increasing the understanding of climate-change and disaster-related statistics in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular trough:
−Development of digital products supporting national reporting on Sendai Framework in Togo, Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon, and Ethiopia.
−Engagement of Community of Practice and Visibility.
Within 6 months, this UNV, under the supervision of the Programme Management Offices from the SDG and Environment Statistics Unit of the Early Warning and Assessment Division of UNEP, and in close collaboration with relevant colleagues from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), will:
−Digitalise a self-assessment tool that countries can use to analyze data availability and identify data gaps on disaster-related statistics.
−Digitalize the toolkit to support implementation of the roadmap to enhance reporting in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 including recommendations on how to ensure sustainability of government efforts in reporting and engage and increase partnerships at regional and national levels with UN agencies, academia, governments.
−Support preparation of a flyer with the description of the project, and communication material such as social media cards.
−Update the UNEP SDG portal with relevant information.