Senior Consultant - Catchment Management

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world. Ricardo, member of WSP, is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Consultant to join our Land Practice, bringing together our expertise in agricultural, soil, and landscape management with our water management capabilities. You will play a key role in delivering and leading consultancy projects focused on sustainable catchment management, supporting the development of evidence-based solutions that balance land use, food systems, water resources, and environmental outcomes. This role offers the opportunity to work within a strong, collaborative team, contributing to our continued growth and innovation in catchment management. You will help shape new business opportunities, strengthen our core capabilities, and engage with key stakeholders across the water, regulatory, and environmental sectors.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and deliver projects for clients including governments, utility companies and private companies.
• Catchment conceptualisation, data gathering, risk assessment, visualization and climate data gathering and processing: climate projections, databases and climate indices.
• Assessing catchment vulnerabilities and risks – including impacts of water quality and resources resilience to climate change and biodiversity loss.
• Delivering spatial catchment risk assessments.
• Identifying and prioritising effective adaptation and mitigation options (including improvements to agricultural practices or nature-based solutions).
• Assessing adaptation and mitigation benefits against key metrics (such as water quality, resources, air quality or biodiversity) as well as identification and quantification of wider benefits.
• Developing and embedding catchment plans and strategies into sectoral policies, strategies and funds.
• Developing costed implementation plans with possible associated finance strategies.
• Developing monitoring and evaluation frameworks (including indicators) for catchment policies, plans, and programmes.
• Managing and contributing to business development activities, including the preparation of proposals and proactive client engagement.
• Participate in capacity building activities including workshop facilitation and delivery.
• Managing a small team of technical experts.

Key Competencies and Experience

• A Bachelors (2.1 or above), Masters or PhD in a relevant scientific subject.
• Experience in catchment management for water quality and / or water resources improvements.
• Knowledge of nature-based solutions and catchment interventions to reduce diffuse and point source pollution and / or improve water resources management.
• Good understanding of water, agricultural, land and environmental policy.
• Good knowledge of the farming systems and the interactions between agricultural production and the environment.
• Highly numerate with strong attention to detail and the ability to scrutinise data.
• Have personal drive and determination to succeed, be self-determining and able to positively contribute to the business.
• A strong track record in client relationship management with an ability to manage projects and deliver client outcomes.
• Strong communications skills, both written and oral to a variety of audiences including to leading scientists, politicians and the public.

Desirable Competencies and Experience

• Proficient use of Microsoft excel (e.g., v lookups, index match) and / or python for data analysis.
• Experience of geospatial analysis in qGIS or ArcMap.
• Experience of environmental models / tools to quantify water quality or resources improvement (e.g., scimap, farmscoper, SAGIS).
• Experience in consultancy (proposal writing, project management, client relationship management).
• Water industry experience or knowledge of water industry regulation.

Skills and behaviours

• Strong project management skills, with the ability to manage time effectively across multiple projects.
• Excellent communication skills and experience engaging directly with clients and colleagues to deliver high-quality solutions.
• Proven ability to lead technical, analytical, and policy-focused work, including the preparation of robust technical reports and proposals.
• Skilled in providing clear, evidence-based advice to clients and internal teams.
• Confident interacting with professionals across the environmental, water, and agricultural sectors, including policymakers at national and international levels.
• Strong written communication skills, with the ability to produce reports and documentation to a professional standard in English.

Working here

You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place. We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on. Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable.

Work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential.

Benefits

We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health.

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and to ensure an inclusive culture, we are recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Next steps

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date. Ricardo is a Disability confident employer please advise the recruitment team via recruit@ricardo.com if you require any adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process.