La Raison d’être d’AXA Climate est d’aider la planète Terre à devenir une véritable partie prenante de toutes les entreprises.
La Mission d’AXA Climate, c’est l’adaptation climatique et environnementale. Au service de cette mission, 4 différents métiers !
- La formation - via des contenus digitaux, scientifiques pour mettre en mouvement tous les collaborateurs, leur donner les compétences et les outils.
- Le conseil - pour impacter en local, via des actions d’adaptation concrètes.
- L’assurance et le financement - pour sécuriser celles et ceux qui s’adaptent, et impactent.
AXA Climate and ETHZ are looking for a joint intern who will support applied research in the domain of agriculture and biodiversity risk management.
Agricultural activities are both vital for sustaining the global populations, but are also negatively impacting biodiversity worldwide. Hence, sustainable goals should be reached that allows agriculture to co-exist with biodiversity. The coexistence between farming and wildlife can be achieved on the alpha and beta niches, either having agricultural practice that allow for within-site biodiversity by being extensive (and thus less productive) or by having some aspect of the land very productive and intense, while leaving part of the land aside for biodiversity to thrive. The ongoing agricultural transition is focused on these two aspects, but we currently lack efficient methods to monitor the effectiveness of these solutions as regard to biodiversity and other services provided by farmlands (agricultural products productions, carbon storage etc.)
Your main task will include
• Perform a literature review on farm-level biodiversity monitoring schemes
• Develop a sampling strategy at the farm level for biodiversity using environmental DNA
• Identify eDNA collection methods adapted to crops and target taxonomic groups
• Compare the advantages and limitations of eDNA analytical approaches
• Evaluate how to summarize multi-dimensional biodiversity information into a performance index