For the 2017-18 academic year, I served as the Climate Risk Management Learning and Research intern for USAID's Office of Global Climate Change through the Virtual Student Federal Service program. 

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My work focuses on a research project on climate change integration into USAID development project across regions and sectors. The goals of the study are to understand the ways in which USAID missions and bureaus are embedding the connections between development and climate change into their activities, to illuminate the areas where the connections are not occurring, and to explore why we find differentiation in integration across different variables including geography and sector.

 

To meet these objectives, I analyzed over 100 activity solicitations to identify all the instances in which they discussed climate change in any capacity. After reading each solicitation for our list of key search terms, I assessed the level to which climate change was included in each section of the document. This process took place over a three-month period. Following the solicitation assessment, I conducted both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the data using NVivo qualitative software and excel.

 

I carried out this study as a follow-on study to a report produced in 2015, so I also carried out a comparative analysis of the data to look for trends and discontinuities in climate integration from 2009 to 2017.