Who are we?

AXA Climate is a company of around 200 climatologists, peril-specific scientists, data scientists, consultants, insurance underwriters and risk modellers using our cutting edge skills to improve climate resilience across the private and public sectors. AXA Climate benefits from being a start up backed by the global AXA Group.

The Public Sector Consulting team within AXA Climate is supporting developing countries to improve their resilience through modelling of current and future climate risks, adaptation solutions and risk financing tools including early warning. We work mainly with development banks, humanitarian actors and international institutions. Flood, especially urban flood, is one of the key risks that developing countries are facing.

Job description

AXA Climate’s Public Sector team is looking for an intern, starting March or April 2025, who will support in modeling climate hazards over multiple geographical locations, designing parametric insurance solutions for weather-related events, performing value for money analyses for climate risk financing tools and other technical analysis for public sector clients. These include the World Bank and other development banks, international institutions, NGOs and governments.

AXA Climate is looking for a candidate with autonomy and with background in hydraulic engineering, in order to reinforce the technical team within the Public Sector domain. The candidate will be working on floods in developing countries, developing models and proposing adaptation measures.

Key accountabilities:

The main task of the candidate will be to carry out quantitative and qualitative flood risk assessments at specific areas of interest (main focus on urban areas) under the supervision of our technical lead and our hydrologist expert, that include the following tasks:

• Hazard assessment: Set up and calibrate/validate flood models to simulate different flood scenarios based on current and future conditions (based on different climate projections), in order to quantify the pluvial and fluvial flood hazard at present and in future time horizons.

• Exposure and vulnerability assessment: Characterize the assets and populations exposed to floods and estimate damage functions based on their features.

• Risk assessment: Combine hazard, exposure and vulnerability to evaluate the (monetized) flood risk at present and in future time horizons.

• Feasibility studies: Propose different flood mitigation measures and assess the benefit (reduction of risk) and cost of implementing such measures, based on the recalculation of the flood risk once the measures are implemented in the flood models.

To carry out these missions, the candidate will use computational hydraulics and hydrology software (SFINCS, WFlow), geospatial analysis software (QGIS) and programming languages (Python), under the guidance of other team members. This can be a great opportunity for the candidate to potentiate such skills.

• Currently enrolled in a MSc (M1/M2) in Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering or Water Management.

• Data science (Python), Statistics. Knowledge in Machine Learning would be a plus.

• Knowledge in hydrodynamic modelling.

• Geospatial data analysis.

• Technical reporting.

• Fluency in English or French. Spanish would be appreciated.

3 interviews:

• One fitting interview

• One technical interview

• A last HR interview

The internship is to start by March or April 2025.