Natural Capital Senior Advisor

Job Description

This is an exciting opportunity to lead, shape and deliver evidence and tools to embed a natural capital approach in the Environment Agency, helping to reverse the decline in nature and tackle the climate emergency. The role will focus on developing evidence and tools that enhance our understanding of natural assets and ecosystem services, enabling planning and decisions that support better environmental and socio-economic outcomes.

This work will be undertaken as part of the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme – Defra’s largest research and development programme; surveying England’s land, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems to produce a baseline assessment of our natural assets. As part of the Chief Scientist’s Group, you will also work across the organisation and with external partners, to develop, advocate for and translate natural capital evidence for operational delivery.

• Use your knowledge of environmental science to work with technical specialists across many disciplines to develop evidence for the condition of natural assets, so that we can reliably understand their capacity to provide ecosystem services.
• Shape and lead projects that enable visualisation of, and access to, our natural capital evidence base.
• Implement robust and consistent data management to ensure natural capital evidence and indicators can be maintained, updated and communicated clearly across multiple policy and planning contexts.
• Use your excellent interpersonal skills to support colleagues and external partners to trial and embed natural capital evidence and tools into business processes that support a source-to-sea natural capital approach and share learning for continuous improvement.

The Natural Capital and Evidence Synthesis team is friendly, collaborative and supportive. We lead the Environment Agency's work on natural capital – developing evidence and tools and helping embed their use in operational delivery. Our team is based in the Chief Scientist’s Group, which forms part of the national office. We help achieve our organisation’s vision to create better ways of delivering environmental outcomes through our evidence, expertise and innovation.

• Understanding of natural capital and its application to environmental management, or willingness to develop this from a background in a related discipline (e.g. freshwater, terrestrial or marine ecosystems, environmental economics, water management).
• Applied data and analysis skills including leading projects which develop evidence to shape operational practice.
• Knowledge of Environment Agency business and our partners.
• Strong relationship building and influencing skills with experience of shaping and delivering ideas collaboratively.
• Organised and flexible, with strong planning and project management skills.
• Problem solving, comfortable working with uncertainty, and experience of implementing innovative solutions.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Being inclusive and valuing diversity in its broadest sense.

We are fully committed to building an inclusive workforce that reflects the communities we serve. We welcome applications seeking flexible‑working patterns, but candidates must be available to attend our team meetings on Wednesdays. As a dispersed team we use hybrid‑working, meaning you will have an EA office base location, with flexibility to work elsewhere. We use digital platforms to engage customers and stay in contact with each other.

Occasional travel to office hubs, such as Bristol and Birmingham, will be required. Short‑listing will be undertaken within 2 weeks of the closing date, with interviews to follow shortly after. A reserve list of unsuccessful candidates will be held for up to 6 months. To discuss the role further, please contact Stuart Rickards, Team Leader kar

Up to 23 months

Please provide an example when you have gathered, critically assessed and interpreted evidence from a range of sources and across disciplines to inform a decision, policy, plan or recommendation.