CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: UBC SUMMER 2026 INTERNSHIPS

Details

This internship provides €6,000 (Euros) to support a full-time, immersive research experience working directly with a faculty member on a climate-related research project over a three-month period (mid-May to mid-August). For Sciences Po students, this opportunity may be considered for the compulsory third-semester internship and count towards academic credits for degree requirements.

Student interns will be registered through the UBC's Visiting International Research Students program and will have access to all supports and resources through this program, as well as will be eligible for on-campus housing during the internship.

Eligibility

Internships are available for students currently studying in France who are interested in a hands-on experience contributing to faculty-led reasearch related to CARE's core themes. To be eligible for the CARE internship, applicants must complete the UBC CARE internship application (link included below)

Selection

Eligible students for the CARE internship should submit an application via the online link provided below. 

Applications will be reviewed and selected by the supervising faculty member (a virtual interview may be required). Applicants will be considered based on academic excellence (GPA) and relevant academic and professional skills and experiences related to specific research project of interest.

Description: The need to address the twin climate and biodiversity crises creates tensions around the use of land, which are particularly visible in agricultural areas. Two margins of land use change are particularly prominent in this context. On the extensive margin, a central question is how to retain and increase the extent of non-productive perennial vegetation in intensive agriculture landscapes without compromising food production; on the intensive margin, a central question is how to optimize input use to minimize the environmental impacts per unit of output produced.

While farmers hold the reins of these decisions, they are targeted by public and private initiatives that use diverse and sometimes quickly evolving angles (marginal land, carbon, precision farming, habitat restoration) to promote certain beneficial practices. They are also subject to multiple layers of regulation whose local applicability and enforcement can be muddled.

The goal of this project is to build a better understanding of the complex network of farmer-directed communication around critical sustainable practices and to identify opportunities for improving clarity, stability, and connections across practices to better support farmer decisions-making. It focuses on two practices that tend to be promoted by separate initiatives: adoption and retention of an on-farm habitat, and optimization of input use, in the intensively farmed region of Southern Ontario.

The student intern will work with Dr. Joséphine Gantois and graduate students in the Environmental Economies and Ecology research group to identify and analyze programs, regulations, and more generally farmer-directed information channels that pertain to either practice. They will use this information to characterize the extent of conflicting or missing information, and identify opportunities for coordination around a core and temporally-stable set of sustainability goals.

Supervising Faculty: Joséphine Gantois

Description: The expanding availability of geospatial data is transforming environmental initiatives worldwide. One of the most mapped environmental challenges is deforestation, which is associated with massive carbon emissions (estimated as contributing to up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually), critical habitat loss, and ecosystem services degradation. Technological advancements make it possible to detect forest loss with astonishing precision, in real time. But has our capacity to map deforestation actually improved our ability to prevent it?

Geospatial analysis identifies agricultural commodity expansion as the top driver of deforestation worldwide, and Canada and many other countries have committed to addressing their roles in driving deforestation both within their borders and through their demand for deforestation-risk commodities imported from abroad. By combining geospatial deforestation data with statistics on trade and investment flows through supply chains, transnational companies can be linked to their environmental impacts far away. Still, major challenges face efforts to leverage geospatial data on deforestation for better forest governance. First, while deforestation may be increasingly easy to map, attributing it to specific drivers remains challenging, particularly land tenure insecurity and weak regulatory oversight, both of which result from and perpetuate a lack of clear spatial data. Second, even when drivers of deforestation are identified, the actors behind them are economically diverse, geographically disbursed and thus difficult to influence. Third, interventions have been criticized for allowing corporations to greenwash while excluding or overburdening smaller, more vulnerable producers.

This project examines how mapping agricultural commodity-driven-deforestation is used to implement zero-deforestation initiatives (ZDls), the latest and largest of which is the EU's Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), and what effects such initiatives have had on the ground. To do so, we focus on two of the main 'forest risk commodities' targeted under the EUDR - rubber and cocoa - selected for the severity of deforestation detected in their supply chains, the prevalence of smallholder producers in each sector, and the reliance on geospatial data by each sector's most prominent ZDls.

The student intern will be tasked with 1) compiling and organizing existing academic and grey literature on the cocoa and rubber supply chains, and 2) selecting and creating profiles on the top sustainable supply chain initiatives in each sector (rubber and cocoa), with a focus on how they approach supply chain traceability, and whether they use geospatial data for any other aspect of their program implementation.

Supervising Faculty: Juliet _Lu