Natural Capital & Resilience Programme Manager

What is Forestry England?

Forestry England looks after England’s public forests with the aim that everyone in England should feel connected to them. We do this by creating and caring for them to enable people to enjoy spending time in them, to enable wildlife to flourish in them and businesses to grow in and alongside us.

We are an arms-length part of government, but the vast majority of our income is generated by us through trading activity. Our ‘distinctiveness’ from other government bodies was reinforced in 2019 by being re-branded as ‘Forestry England’, with a new Board to oversee our performance.

Natural Capital

We expect anyone applying for this role to be familiar with natural capital as a concept, and with recent developments in its prominence in the environmental sector in the UK.

Everything Forestry England aims to deliver for society is an ecosystem service, and, historically, the value of those ecosystem services has not always been recognised when decisions about our public forests have been made. Forestry England saw the new natural capital approach as an opportunity to adopt a methodology that would more accurately reflect the value of what we try to deliver.

Forestry England has therefore been at the forefront of adopting natural capital as a way of strategically identifying the value of what we do, and whether we are securing an increase in the natural capital asset value of the forests we are entrusted with.

We have now started to explore how we can use the approach to add value at an operational level.

Forestry England was the first organisation in the world to do a natural capital account for a national scale organisation, and others in the UK environmental sector have found our leadership in this field helpful. We want to continue to develop the profile of our work and through it to support the sector to use a natural capital approach to add value.

We have a policy statement that sums up our natural capital approach:

‘The Natural Capital concept allows Forestry England to express the vast value that our forests provide to society beyond a traditional financial appraisal.

We use an optimising approach to Natural Capital, within the constraints of financial sustainability, to support management decisions. This enables Forestry England to develop superb forests for the Nation, remain at the forefront of global contemporary forest management and respond effectively to government policy.

By extending our natural capital approach through our influence and supply chains we can effect change beyond our boundaries, increasing our impact and the benefits forests provide to the wider society.’

Forest Resilience

Environmental change is placing pressure on the nation’s forests; from the climate crisis and global heating, to outbreaks of pests and diseases, an expanding human population, and the continued accumulation of pollutants that don’t degrade such as plastic.

Resilience is “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change”.

Forestry England are currently developing their approach to building resilience into the nation’s forests. There are a variety of ways we can improve the resilience of our forests, for instance through the implementation of forest development types as a guide to planning and management, improving connectivity between woodland areas, and increasing the diversity of species. Building and maintaining forest resilience is crucial in securing the natural capital of the nation’s forests for future generations.

Purpose of Job

Lead and coordinate Forestry England’s natural capital and resilience work, ensuring that:

1. Natural capital reporting continuously improves so that it allows the Board and Executive Team to make increasingly good strategic decisions.
2. Strategic approaches to forest resilience are driven forward and integrated into forest planning and management.
3. Natural capital and forest resilience approaches are embedded into day to day working across teams so that operational decisions optimise our natural capital asset value and forest resilience.
4. Forestry England continues to be at the forefront of natural capital and forest resilience application in the sector, benefiting others by sharing our learning and benefitting Forestry England by the enhancement of our reputation.

Responsibilities

Key Work Areas

1. Board and Executive strategic understanding of performance:

i. Provide leadership on the delivery of the annual natural capital account (NCA).
ii. Improve and expand the NCA to include missing ecosystem services, while also evolving and improving our current indicators.
iii. Help the new Forestry England Board to engage with NCA information, and adapt it in response to their feedback to enable them to use it to challenge performance.
iv. Work with the Insight & Policy Manager on the development of national indicators of forest resilience.

2. Driving operational improvements:

i. Enable operational colleagues to consistently, and with validity, build a minimum level of natural capital information into high impact decision making.
ii. Developing a programme to pilot a broad ranging tool to optimise natural capital in decision making.
iii. Identify and deliver additional ways of FE achieving income for ecosystem services.
iv. Deliver actions from the Forest Resilience Steering Group, articulate the principles of a resilient forest within national policy, and integrate these principles into planning and operational delivery within the nation’s forests.

3. Internal and external communications, training, and support:

i. Internally facilitate colleagues to engage, learn, and share experience of implementing Forestry England’s approach to natural capital and forest resilience.
ii. Tell our story to those outside Forestry England, helping them to understand our approach to natural capital and resilience and how it helps us to do a good job.
iii. Maintain knowledge and awareness of the developments in natural capital and forest resilience across the sector.

Person Specification

Experience

Essential

• Experience of working in technical subjects, including developing operational responses to technical issues and helping others to implement them.
• Experience of initiating and delivering practical changes in team ways of working and outputs. Experience where novel concepts, which could easily be dismissed as non-core work, have become fully integrated into ways of working to deliver better results would be particularly desirable.
• Experience of delivering training, communications, and support to assist new ways of working.

Desirable

• Experience developing strategic indicators, to effectively inform executive team members about business delivery.
• Experience of applying natural capital/forest resilience concepts and their technical challenges to real world situations.

Technical knowledge and understanding

Essential

• Strong level of knowledge of Natural Capital and approaches to integrating the concept into practical applications.

• Strong level of knowledge and understanding of the threats from the climate crisis and how resilience to these pressures can be developed with regards to biodiversity and forestry.

• Knowledge and understanding of wider sustainability and environmental reporting approaches, their application and current developments within sector.

Desirable

• Relevant knowledge of Forestry England’s areas of business.
• Higher level degree in a suitable discipline

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Working Together
• Communicating and Influencing
• Delivering at Pace

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension