Job Profile: Head of Sustainability

Name: Pedro Flores

Location: The role operates across all eight of London's Royal Parks and other important green spaces in the capital, including Brompton Cemetery and Victoria Tower Gardens  

Employer: The Royal Parks charity

Job Responsibilities:

This important and varied role is core to The Royal Park’s strategic objectives to incorporate sustainable practices into everything we do, as we work together towards creating climate-resilient parks for future generations.

The role provides strategic sustainability leadership across The Royal Parks, ensuring that sustainability is at the heart of our work, inspiring our staff, driving exciting initiatives, maintaining standards and creating change for the future. Every day is different and it is a privilege to work with such talented colleagues to conserve and enhance the parks, strive to reduce emissions and foster a collective passion to drive our shared responsibility to protect the parks against the impact of climate change.

This includes delivering the ISO14001 system to ensure compliance, carbon reduction, and strong environmental performance. (ISO 14001 is an internationally-record for environmental management systems (EMS), that helps organisations improve their environmental performance and manage their environmental responsibilities.)

The role oversees Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting - a mandatory UK government framework requiring reporting on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in annual reports.

Another key aspect of the job is to oversee Environmental Permits, legal documents issued by environmental regulators, (the Environment Agency or local councils), to review how we deliver operations.

The role also involves carrying out due diligence round the Modern Slavery Act, as well as ensuring that sustainability is embedded into procurement processes.

Working with teams, contractors, and partners, I have responsibility to drive sustainable initiatives on water, energy, waste, environmental awareness, and incident response, while providing expert advice, supporting funding opportunities, engaging and educating staff and representing the charity in external forums and policy consultations.

I spend the majority of my time supporting all the different teams across the charity in their different areas of work: from Park teams to input into initiatives to enhance and improve the parks, to Commercial teams - which includes input into the delivery of events and our leisure offering, right through to the CEO’s office to input into governance – as well as working with our communications staff.

Tasks include working on setting the sustainability requirements for future tenders, evaluating present tender bidder’s responses, delivering our sustainability strategy to park managers and managing our utility portfolio. And communicating all this and more to staff, our peers and the public. There is a never-ending list of tasks.

I spend about 15 percent of my time outdoors and around 85 percent of my time indoors and I enjoy this variation.

In this role, every day and every season is different. I spend much more time outdoors in summer during major events, for example, while carrying out sustainability audits to ensure contractual requirements with service providers are upheld.

And as the charity is ISO 14001 accredited, we carry out internal audits across all of our operations throughout the year - which of course means a lot of desk time and meetings.

Qualifications needed:

I have a Master's Degree in Environmental Engineering. Generally, for this type of role in public parks, you will need to be educated to degree level in a relevant discipline such as environmental sciences, and to be able to demonstrate a broad experience of undertaking environmental management and improvements in public and, or, private sector operations.

Additional training:

• BREEAM Advisory Professional trained, (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology), the professional membership body for sustainability and environmental design.
• Membership of The Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals, (ISEP), which oversees environmental and sustainability standards.
• Business and Climate Change: Towards Net Zero Emissions certified.
• NEBOSH Environmental Management certified. (The National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health is a global organisation, which provides health, safety and environmental qualifications.)
• Competency on Environmental Noise measurement from the Institute of Acoustics.
• Imperial Sustainability Leadership Programme, certified by Imperial College Business School.

Skills needed: 

Resilience is a key skill. Sustainability is about delivering change, so you need to persuade others and bring them along on the journey.

Therefore, the ability to lead and influence senior colleagues is important: great people skills and technical ability are key requisites. And you are often dealing with some highly technical topics, so to have an impact with wide audiences you must also be good at bringing complex ideas to life using simple language.

Advice to anyone looking at similar roles:

Sustainability is wide-ranging and complex. It requires versatility, multitasking, energy and passion to inspire everyone to play they part in creating climate resilient parks for future generations.

It is important to identify the colleagues that will help you deliver change, drive initiatives and work closely with you to ensure that sustainability is threaded into everyone’s agenda.

If you have any queries about this role or would like to ask a question please get in touch here.

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