Project Manager – Chemicals, environment and human health, European Environment Agency (EEA)

The European Environment Agency (EEA) is organising an open competition with a view to recruiting a contract agent to work as Project Manager within the area of chemicals, environment and human health and further with a view to establishing a reserve list.

THE AGENCY

The EEA is an Agency of the European Union (EU) and one of the decentralised Union bodies. The EEA aims to support sustainable development and to help achieve significant and measurable improvement inEurope’s environment, through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information to policy-making agents and the public.

JOB DESCRIPTION

Europe’s chemical industry is growing faster than the economy as a whole, increasing the flows of chemicals through Europe’s economy and releases to the environment – air, water and soil. Even small amounts of some chemicals can endanger human health. With such increasing impacts and improved scientific understanding of their effects on people and the ecosystems services that underpin human well-being, the challenge is to find the right balance between the societal benefits and societal risks and harm of chemicals.

Some chemicals, such as those containing heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants, have been known to be dangerous for many years already, while fears have been raised about many others recently such as endocrine disrupting chemicals and how they interfere with the normal functioning of the endocrine system. For most of these chemicals, however, relatively little is known about how they pass through the environment, whether they are accumulated, dispersed or transformed and what their combined health effects are in cases of human exposure to complex mixtures.

There are also growing policy demands for life-cycle initiatives aimed at reducing these flows through actions that span the entire chain – the primary producers in the chemicals industry, all sectors of industry, individual consumers, and the waste disposal sector – and for increased substitution to less hazardous chemical products through upstream innovations.

The EEA is increasing its capacity to analyse the environmental pathways of chemicals and their impacts on human health, in particular via environmental exposure pathways. The focus is on improving the evidence base by identifying and linking relevant datasets, particularly regarding human health impacts and human bio-monitoring, and improving their accessibility. The work in this area also informs the development of more systematic approaches to risk governance.

Under the responsibility of the Head of Green Economy Group, reporting to the Head of Integrated Environmental Assessments Programme, the Project Manager shall be responsible for information support and analysis in these areas.

The position will entail the following tasks:

• Act as reference person in the European Environment Agency for chemicals and human health;
• Analyse the environmental fate of chemicals and associated risks to ecosystem services and human health and well-being;
• Undertake data handling and indicator-based analysis, and manage supporting activities of the ETC WMGE;
• Participate in European Commission initiatives to improve the evidence base, such as the Information Platform on Chemicals Monitoring (IPCheM), and the European Human Bio-monitoring Initiative (EHBMI) under Horizon 2020;
• Participate in broader integrated environmental assessment projects such as the EEA Environment and Human Well-being report planned for 2018;
• Lead on analyses of  approaches to ‘greening’ the chemical sector;
• Represent the Agency through networking with relevant external partners and stakeholders, in particular with the EU institutions and EEA member countries (EIONET network), and relevant EU Agencies (e.g. ECHA and EFSA).

The place of work will be Copenhagen, Denmark.

Closing date for application: Friday 12 June 2015, at 12.00 (Central European Time)

Read more and apply here.