Description:
About us:
The American Forest Foundation (AFF) unlocks the power of family forests as a climate solution while helping thousands of landowners care for their land and improve forest health. Through its Family Forest Carbon Program, AFF expands access to the voluntary carbon market for family forest owners from all walks of life while producing high quality forest carbon credits to help companies reach their net zero goals. The organizations strategic direction seeks to enable family forests to capture and store one billion tonnes of carbon by 2050.
We do not do this alone. AFF works across a broad coalition of conservation partners, corporations, and policymakers to equip family forest owners with financial and technical support to implement sustainable forest management practices on their lands and activate their forests as a critical tool in the fight against climate change.
AFF is in a mode of complex problem solving and rapid iteration. All teams at AFF are working to discover solutions to the planets most pressing climate issues through developing and iterating viable and scalable models for impact. AFF is driven by values of our shared purpose, measurable and verifiable results, and learning for continuous improvement to tackle big conservation challenges.
About the Role:
The Forest Carbon Specialist, MRV (Northeast), is responsible for supporting the technical measurement component of the Family Forest Carbon Programs monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) work for the Northeast, including ensuring the quality and efficiency of our monitoring measurements and data; training and coordinating contract foresters carrying out monitoring work; applying our monitoring procedures to new regions and forestry practices; and innovating upon our monitoring processes to improve cost efficiency, accuracy, and timeliness of the data collected. The MRV technical work this position is accountable for, is critical to the production of high-quality climate claims and the overall success of the Family Forest Carbon Program. This position will report to the Senior Technical Manager, MRV.
Responsibilities:
- Apply Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) & inventory design for forest carbon accounting methodologies utilized for the Family Forest Carbon Program, while ensuring alignment with program wide SOPs and revised methodologies.
- Coordinate the field portion of the monitoring, reporting, and verification process in the Northeast. Including soliciting, training, and facilitating coordination with contracted MRV foresters.
- Coordinate with the lead supply forester manager in Northeast region where staff and/or consultants are being utilized for both pre-enrollment and monitoring activities to ensure timely measurements are taken.
- Plan for and carrying out quality assurance and quality control on monitoring measurements, per the Family Forest Carbon Program monitoring procedures.
- Identify opportunities for improvements to the monitoring processes and standard operating procedures, including but not limited to reducing cost, reducing time from landowner enrolment to measurements being taken; minimizing uncertainty while decreasing plots needed to be installed or frequency of measurements, consider incorporating new technologies to support efficiency & effectiveness; improving how we communicate about monitoring to foresters and landowners; etc.
- Maintain monitoring inventory databases (including loss event tracking) in the Northeast, while upholding data integrity and rigor in alignment with program-wide systems.
- Support building out potential opportunities for the use of remote sensing in inventory processes
- Support technical consideration within the context of program strategy, especially within the work associated with AFF’s partner New England Forest Foundation (NEFF).
- Support technical aspects of Carbon credit Validation and Verification process.
Requirements:
Candidate requirements:
Core Competencies:
- Agility Thriving in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments by anticipating and responding to changes with swift, focused and flexible actions.
- Collaborating with Others Working together with others in a cooperative and supportive manner to achieve shared goals.
- Ensuring Accountability Holding yourself and others to high standards of accountability, creating an infrastructure and transparent organization culture that supports and measures personal and organizational responsibility and accountability.
- Problem Solving Identifying problems and the solutions to them. Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is passionate, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.
Job Function Competencies:
- Attention to Detail – Working in a conscientious, consistent and thorough manner.
- Data Literacy – Using data to gain insights, solve problems, and inform decisions.
- Planning and Organizing – Making and executing plans to reach goals supporting organizational success.
- Analytical Thinking – Analyzing and synthesizing information to understand issues, identify options, and support sound decision making.
Whats attractive to the right candidate:
- You have the unique and exciting opportunity to work with amazing colleagues, partners and landowners to help connect forest landowners with technical and financial assistance to better steward their land and achieve vital landscape-scale conservation impacts.
- Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is passionate, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.
- We offer a flexible work environment that respects your life outside of work. Salary is commensurate with experience. AFF offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package.
- Willingness to travel to perform monitoring and on-site training of monitoring foresters.
- Occasional travel for 9 months (75%) of the year (about 10% of time).
- Potentially heavy travel for 3 months (25%) of the year during heavy measurements season (about 80% of time), though this is open to delegation to staff/consultants as this position sees fit and as fits within the financial models.
Contact us to apply
We know there are great candidates who may not check all these boxes, and we also know you might bring important skills that we havent considered. If that applies to you, dont hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.
We are committed to creating a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or any other basis protected by law.