Programme Lead, Asia Electricity Transition

We are looking for an experienced leader and strategist. Your role is to maximise the impact of the team’s research, whilst growing the team further across all of Asia.

The world needs to rapidly phase down coal power, and since Asia is home to 80% of the world’s coal power, this role is a unique opportunity to influence one of the most important policy areas of this decade.

We have already had impact in countries across Asia, as we track and comment on the electricity transition. Key research areas at the moment are on beginning India’s coal phasedown, widening China’s focus on the electricity transition to ensure it gets enough political priority outside of the energy sphere, and working on utility solar uptake across ASEAN countries. Our work in India has already helped move the narrative to talk confidently of “peaking coal”, and also to bring into focus how to avoid the futility of building new coal power plants.

This is a remote post, working with a pan-Asian team.

Ember is an independent energy & climate think tank, using data to drive down carbon emissions from electricity generation and phase-out coal. We gather, curate and analyse data on the global power system – and use our findings to improve energy and climate policy. You’ll be joining us at a period of rapid growth, and be part of an innovative team that’s having a global impact in tackling climate change. We are also a founding member of Subak, the world’s first non-profit accelerator that scales climate impact through data, policy and behaviour change.

See our work at www.ember-climate.org and https://twitter.com/EmberClimate

Key responsibilities

• Manage Ember’s existing four Asia electricity analysts, including line management and development.
• Build the team towards a target of ten analysts.
• Coordinate Ember’s research and advocacy work across the region, to maximise the team’s impact.
• Coordinate Ember’s Asia strategy to ensure alignment and effective collaboration across all teams, including policy, data, comms and ops.
• Further develop and implement our strategy, ensuring each region (China, India, SE Asia) has a clear strategic vision and that the team's activities are aligned with that vision . This includes bringing together multiple teams across Ember to identify priority countries/regions, and develop our theory of change for promoting electricity transition in those countries/regions.
• Provide inputs into Ember’s overarching strategy for expediting the electricity transition around the world.

Essential skills

• Minimum 5 years working as a Programme Manager for a climate think tank, NGO, foundation or other organisation.
• Proven experience in successfully building and managing multi-disciplinary, global teams.
• Significant experience in understanding political change, and how to use research and data to impact policy across multiple countries in Asia.
• Excellent communications skills, both written and verbal, experienced in outreach and influencing the clean energy narrative in Asia.
• Passionate about phasing out coal in Asia.
• Fluent in English and at least one Asian language.
• An effective networker with an established network in the energy and climate space.

Nice to have

• A thought leader in Asia’s electricity transition.
• Extensive experience of media engagement across a range of platforms.
• Fascination with data and data visualisation, to complement Ember’s strong Data and Dataviz teams