Principal Consultant: Carbon Pricing Policy

Overview:
**Role**:Principal Consultant - Carbon Pricing Policy

**Location**:London / Harwell / Shoreham / Bristol / Manchester / Glasgow / Madrid / Italy / Belgium - Hybrid

**Role ID**: 2025-3026

**Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world.**

Ricardo plc 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.

**Role Purpose**

We have an opportunity for a Principal carbon pricing and climate policy specialist to support business development and delivery within our Policy, Strategy and Economics Practice. We are one of Europe’s leading consultancies supporting the UK Government, the European Commission, overseas governments and multilateral development agencies in the development, implementation and appraisal of climate change policy and carbon pricing.

The team works across many climate change mitigation policy areas and you will bring technical expertise on one or more of these. They include international climate change agreements, national mitigation policy instruments especially carbon pricing and market-based measures, industry sectoral incentives, and innovation technologies and funding. Our work is often multidisciplinary and specialisms in economic analysis/modelling, legal analysis or engineering would be an advantage.

Your work will involve project management, technical delivery and business development activities including competitive bidding, client and partner relationship management and participation in promotional events. You will also be responsible for technical leadership and in supporting the development of more junior staff within the practice.

You will have the capability to work across the project life cycle, from early stage prospecting through bidding and the successful delivery of projects. You will have a strong commercial awareness and energy and enthusiasm for growing the business in your technical area. Ideally, you will have experience in leading or working on proposals and projects for clients such as development banks, the European Commission and national governments.

**K**ey Responsibilities**
- Monitoring market developments and shaping company business development activities to take advantage of emerging opportunities.
- Development and maintenance of close client and partner relationships at high level to support winning new business.
- Leading, managing and contributing to complex proposals.
- Leading the delivery of large complex projects or tasks within such projects. Responsibility for client satisfaction, timely delivery, project financial management and high-quality outputs.
- Leading and mentoring other staff in their involvement in bids and projects.
- Carrying out detailed technical work to contribute to high quality project delivery.
- Leading and participating in capacity building activities including workshop facilitation and presentation delivery.
- Presenting Ricardo Energy & Environment’s work at client meetings and conferences

**Key Competencies and Experience**
- Educated to at least Bachelor’s degree level specializing in scientific, engineering, environmental, legal or economic fields.
- Experience leading business development and/or competitive bid writing in a consultancy environment is essential.
- Experience working within multidisciplinary teams is essential, and experience managing large project teams is desirable.
- Experience managing or working within projects for clients such as the European Commission, World Bank, GIZ, EBRD, Asian Development Bank and UK Government is essential.
- Strong understanding of the climate change policy and global carbon pricing landscape is essential, with particular expertise in one or more of the following areas desirable:
- EU energy and climate change policy especially the measures implemented under the EU Emissions Trading Directive, the Energy Efficiency Directive, and the Effort Sharing Regulation. Familiarity with the EU Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism is also desirable.
- International climate change negotiations especially the market mechanisms envisaged under the Paris Agreement.
- Carbon taxes and trading systems in place or planned around the world.
- UK low carbon initiatives especially the Net Zero agenda, Clean Growth Strategy, Industrial strategy and decarbonisation policy measures.

**Desirable**
- Strong project management skills with track record in leading complex projects.
- Excellent written and spoken English essential; fluency in other European languages will be an advantage. Strong Spanish or French language skills proven in a professional environment will be considered a particu