A key role for the Climate Centre in the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement is to foster evidence-based knowledge that informs action on the ground and provides a basis for good decision-making through close academic collaborations.
This includes engagement in our internship programme with young academics who are enrolled in a master’s- or PhD-level course at university. Our interns are a diverse community of learners from all disciplines and backgrounds, as is our team itself.
We offer three- to six-month placements to successful candidates, who are supervised throughout their work on with current projects and research within our priority areas by the relevant technical expert; we also offer a small stipend.
Specific or specialist vacancies for interns are advertised on this page (see links below).
Short placements for young academics
Hannah Sizelove
Hannah interned with the Climate Centre for four months in 2020, from her US base evaluating the extent to which heatwaves qualify for humanitarian financing in (alphabetically) Bangladesh, Colombia, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam. She contributed to a policy brief, presented research at the Red Cross Red Crescent virtual climate summit, and supported the expansion of public awareness videos and a question and answer system powered by artificial intelligence. She also initiated monthly video calls by our junior researchers around the world.
More on HannahTestimonies
“The Climate Centre takes care to understand what you want to learn in your internship, and it really delivers in trying to achieve those goals while pursuing their own overarching goals” – Maya Adams (Uganda, 2020)
“I have learned so much with the Climate Centre and it has been a great introduction to the humanitarian field” – Hannah Forkell (US, 2020)
“I have learned a lot. I have more knowledge on issues of climate change and health than I did before” – Time Munthali (Malawi, 2020)
Intern playlist
Our interns have taken part in a huge variety of events over the past decade and more, many of the related to work with youth, but all of them at the core of the Climate Centre’s mission to understand and address the humanitarian impacts of climate change.
Erin Coughlan de Perez
Erin Coughlan de Perez interned in the summer of 2011 and later joined our science team full-time. She single-handedly developed the forecast-based financing methodology as part of her doctoral thesis in climate risk management, rolled out in Uganda (picture), and is also now a Lead Author of the IPCC Working Group II report on climate impacts. “The Climate Centre enabled me to work at the intersection of science, policy, and practice, which has given depth and relevance to my research,” she says. Boston-based Erin is now Dignitas Professor at Tufts University.
More on Erin
Linking science and humanitarian work around the world
In the early days of our internship programme, ten young scholars from Columbia University worked with Red Cross and Red Crescent teams to link climate science with humanitarian work. (Video shot by IFRC and the International Research Institute For Climate and Society at Columbia University.)