Geospatial Climate Intelligence Board Adviser

The mandate

The board repeatedly asks whether its geospatial climate models should remain portfolio-screening tools, influence individual underwriting, or underpin paid adaptation services for owners and councils. Management presentations combine historical hazard, remote sensing, asset characteristics and long-horizon projections into precise property scores, without making model disagreement, spatial resolution or decision time horizon visible.

The adviser will reserve three days per month for scientific and product evidence, a chair or committee session, and preparation or individual conversations with underwriters and adaptation leaders. Five committee meetings are included; a time-sensitive portfolio or client question receives acknowledgement within one business day and a reasoned response within three, not an operational approval.

The appointment runs for ten months through the next product and risk-capital decision. The committee chair may propose one renewal of up to four months if a specified insurer or public-sector partnership awaits evidence, but only the board may renew and model uncertainty itself is not grounds for an indefinite term.

The adviser has no line authority, voting right or executive accountability for underwriting, pricing, risk appetite, public warnings, model release, client representations or capital allocation. Named executives own those choices and must distinguish adopted advice from their own decision; the adviser cannot be presented as certifying a property, hazard forecast or insurance outcome.

Concurrent climate, insurance and public-interest work is allowed after disclosure. A role with a competing analytics company, contingent fee from an insurer or developer, material interest in a data supplier, or confidential council mandate over a geography under review creates a conflict that may require access restriction, recusal or appointment termination.

Why the board wants this voice

The committee contains experienced insurers and climate scientists, but nobody has governed geospatial machine learning across both portfolio decisions and adaptation services. Management’s single-score presentation makes sophisticated modelling easier to consume while hiding when source resolution and projection uncertainty matter most. The board wants a practitioner who can preserve usefulness without allowing visual precision to outrun evidence.

What you will own

• Press management to define the exact portfolio, property or adaptation decision each output informs and the consequence of a wrong classification.
• Test lineage and resolution across hazard layers, earth observation, elevation, building attributes, claims and intervention data before accepting local inference.
• Challenge calibration across region, peril, time horizon and asset type, exposing where sparse observations or distribution change widen uncertainty.
• Shape use boundaries distinguishing portfolio screening, underwriting referral, pricing input, customer explanation and public adaptation planning.
• Probe adaptation-value claims for selection bias, counterfactual weakness, implementation quality and the delay between intervention and observed loss.
• Evaluate data and model partnerships for refresh rights, spatial gaps, derivative ownership, explainability, termination and prohibited downstream representation.
• Frame the final board record with approved uses, deferred decisions, dissent, uncertainty communication and evidence required before narrower-grained deployment.

Candidate qualifications

• Governed geospatial, catastrophe or climate-risk models used in property, infrastructure, insurance or public adaptation decisions.
• Connected earth-observation and hazard data to asset-level outcomes while recognising limits imposed by resolution, coverage and temporal mismatch.
• Changed or stopped an underwriting or investment use after calibration, projection or local validation evidence proved inadequate.
• Built uncertainty communication that boards, underwriters and customers could use without collapsing multiple scenarios into spurious certainty.
• Structured climate-data or analytics partnerships with clear refresh, derivative, explanation, audit and exit rights.
• Advised across insurer, owner and public-sector interests without allowing commercial incentives to determine technical confidence.

Non-negotiables

• Can attend all five Auckland committee meetings and travel to the two designated insurer, council or field-evidence reviews.
• Will disclose climate-data holdings, insurer and developer mandates, public contracts and relationships with geospatial suppliers.
• Accepts that accountable executives retain underwriting, pricing, warning and adaptation decisions and that advice is not certification.
• Has governed deployed geospatial risk decisions; remote-sensing research or generic sustainability advisory work alone is insufficient.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe one property decision you narrowed because geospatial resolution or climate uncertainty made the original use indefensible.
2. 49 words maximum. Which current insurer, developer, council, data or analytics relationship could affect your independence?
3. 49 words maximum. Confirm the Auckland cadence and name the evidence needed before a portfolio score informs an individual property decision.