Internship – Data Analyst

Internship Internship – Data Analyst – Quantitative Evidence on the Impact of Climate Change on Animal Health using WAHIS and historical WOAH animal health data, DIAD – WOAH HQ Paris, France Context The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH – founded as OIE) is a leading intergovernmental organisation representing 183 Members worldwide. Through its activities, WOAH makes a decisive contribution to improving animal health, protecting animal welfare and strengthening Veterinary Services. The Organisation provides transparent information on world’s animal health situation, and promotes international standards, particularly in terms of the safety of trade in live animals and animal products. More information can be found on WOAH’s website . Joining WOAH means taking part in the development of one of the leading international organisations, recognised and associated with other multilateral institutions, in the field of worldwide health. It means helping to build a global approach to health, combining animal and human health in a “One Health” approach. It means joining teams motivated by the impact of their actions, the sense of their collective commitment and their recognised professionalism in their respective fields of expertise. WOAH’s headquarters are based in Paris. The Organisation is present on every continent through 13 Regional or Sub-regional Representations. WOAH has 250 staff members, two-thirds of whom are based at headquarters. Job Description Positioning and reporting The Intern will report to Gilles Guillot ( ), Head of the Data Integration and Analytics Department, and will be under the supervision of Paolo Tizzani ( ), Senior Veterinary Epidemiologist. Job purpose Background The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), whose statutory name is “Office International des Epizooties”, was created on 25 January 1924. WOAH is an intergovernmental organisation subject to public international law. It is responsible for improving animal health worldwide. The standards it develops for the trade of live animals and products of animal origin are recognised by the World Trade Organization as reference international sanitary rules (Home – WOAH – World Organisation for Animal Health). Since its foundation, WOAH has been collecting information on animal diseases. As knowledge of pathogens and diseases is crucial for animal and human health, WOAH asks all its Members to report the occurrence of specific pathogens and diseases on the official list in a timely and complete manner. This information is collected and displayed on a specific public interface, the World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS). WAHIS collects official information from 183 WOAH Members and around 20 non-Members, providing a global snapshot of the animal health situation, with a continuous series of disease events available since 2005. Before WAHIS, official animal health information was collected through the Handistatus II system, which holds data for the period 1996–2004. For earlier decades, the information reported by Members was compiled and published by WOAH in annual and periodic publications (such as the World Animal Health yearbooks), which are currently available mainly as PDF documents and have not yet been structured into a database. Taken together, these sources represent one of the longest and most geographically comprehensive official records of animal disease occurrence worldwide, potentially spanning more than four decades. Climate change is increasingly recognised as a major driver of infectious disease dynamics. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns and in the frequency of extreme weather events (heatwaves, droughts, floods) can alter disease transmission by acting on pathogens, vectors and hosts, by shifting the geographical ranges of vectors and wildlife reservoirs, and by interacting with land use, farming systems, animal movements and trade. Its impact on animal health, however, remains understudied compared with its impact on human health. A systematic review recently co-authored by WOAH (Lavarello-Schettini A. et al. , Climate change and animal infectious diseases: a systematic review of emerging evidence , Lancet Planetary Health, 2026) identified only 33 studies, published between 1970 and 2024, that empirically linked climatic factors to observed disease outcomes in animal populations. Although most of them (73%) reported positive associations between climatic variables and increased disease risk, expanded geographical range or higher prevalence, the evidence base remains geographically and taxonomically imbalanced: it is dominated by vector-borne diseases and domestic species, while Africa, South-East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Oceania, wildlife hosts, and bacterial, parasitic and directly transmitted diseases are under-represented. More than 6,000 studies were excluded because they relied only on environmental suitability indices, modelled vector abundance or synthetic outcomes, highlighting a persistent scarcity of longitudinal empirical disease data linked to long-term changes in weather and climate. The review calls on institutions that already hold such data to make them available for research, and for animal health surveillance to become climate-aware. With its multi-decadal official records of disease occurrence for all its Members, WOAH is uniquely placed to help fill this gap. Purpose WOAH intends to generate robust quantitative evidence on the impact of climate change and climate variability on animal health at global, regional and national levels, by linking its long-term official animal disease data with climate, environmental and other data on the drivers of disease emergence and spread. This evidence will inform WOAH’s work on climate change and One Health, and will contribute to WOAH publications and to peer-reviewed scientific articles. The overall mission of the intern will therefore be to update and extend the review of the evidence on climate change and animal health, to build an integrated long-term dataset that combines WOAH animal disease data with climate, environmental and other covariates, and to apply robust statistical and spatio-temporal methods to quantify the associations between climatic drivers and changes in the occurrence, seasonality and geographical distribution of WOAH-listed diseases. Objectives The objectives of this project are: - To carry out a systematic or scoping review of the impact of climate change and climate variability on animal health, building on and extending the review by Lavarello-Schettini et al. (2026), for example by covering the most recent literature, additional bibliographic databases and grey literature, and by mapping the climate-sensitive diseases, mechanisms and drivers identified. - To build a harmonised, analysis-ready dataset of WAHIS animal disease data for the period 2005–2026, by disease, host category, country/territory, sub-national level where available, and time. If data quality allows, to extend this dataset back to 1996 using HandiStatus II data (1996–2004), and back to 1980 by extracting historical data from WOAH publications available in PDF format, using AI-assisted and other data extraction tools, with a documented validation of the quality of the extracted data. - To identify, collect and harmonise the climate, environmental and other covariates that may affect disease emergence and spread (see indicative list below), at spatial and temporal resolutions consistent with the animal health data. - To quantify the associations between climatic variables (including anomalies and extreme events) and animal disease outcomes using appropriate statistical and spatio-temporal models, accounting for confounding factors and for the heterogeneity of surveillance and reporting over time and across countries. - To identify the diseases, host categories and regions most sensitive to climate, and to document the whole work in a reproducible analytical pipeline and in scientific outputs. Indicative covariates to be considered The final selection of covariates will be informed by the review and agreed with the supervisors. They may include: - Climate: temperature (mean, minimum, maximum and anomalies), precipitation, humidity, drought indices (e.g. SPEI), extreme weather events (heatwaves, floods, droughts) and large-scale climate oscillations (e.g. ENSO, Indian Ocean Dipole, NAO), from sources such as ERA5/Copernicus, CHIRPS, CRU TS or WorldClim. - Environment and ecology: land cover and land-use change, deforestation, vegetation indices (e.g. NDVI), surface water and wetlands, elevation, vector distribution or habitat suitability, and wild bird migratory routes. - Animal populations and production: livestock and poultry densities (e.g. FAO Gridded Livestock of the World, FAOSTAT), production systems and wildlife distribution. - Human and socio-economic factors: human population density, trade in live animals and animal products, economic indicators, armed conflicts and population displacement. - Surveillance and reporting factors: capacity of Veterinary Services (e.g. PVS Pathway indicators), reporting compliance and completeness, and changes in disease listing and reporting systems over time, to account for reporting bias. Missions and activities Inception: material and methods - A document describing the methodological approach, covering the review protocol, the animal health and covariate data sources, the extraction strategy for historical data, and the analytical methods retained, with the rationale for their selection. - A list of the data, accesses and infrastructure needed to apply the methodology selected. - A work plan setting out the timeline for the deliverables. Systematic or scoping review - A review protocol following recognised guidelines (e.g.