2023 Awards Winner’s Highlight: Medium Consultancy of the Year

Wildwood Ecology Limited

This award was sponsored by:

Wildwood Ecology provides ecological services to a diverse portfolio of clients, but its expertise lies with providing support to architects, planning consultants, heritage organisations and local authorities. Although the focus of its work is planning and development, this diversity ensures that we are not dependent on any one sector, such as new residential developments. In Autumn of 2022 they introduced arboricultural services that both complement and augments their ecological work.

Wildwood believes that all businesses can and should be a force for good, so it became a proud member of the B Corp community in July 2019 and successfully re-certified in 2022. Improvements made over the past two years – in areas such as investment in technology, training and development and recruitment – have enabled Wildwood to grow in alignment with its vision and values.

Key staff have both established and supported bat groups across Wales and England. They have Richard Dodd (Managing Director) is a mentor under CIEEM’s scheme and has supported ten mentees that include undergraduates and career changing individuals seeking a career as an ecologist and early career ecologists looking to advance their careers.

Wildwood Ecology launched the Ecology Academy in 2020, which provides on-line and hybrid training courses for aspiring and practising ecologists. The platform provides a growing resource of learning for individuals, and it offers bespoke training for ecological consultancies and universities, including Nottingham Trent University (NTU).

Wildwood Ecology has set ambitious emissions targets and commits to reduce its baseline absolute scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2025 and 100% by 2030. To help reduce both Scope 1 & 2 emissions, in 2022 Wildwood Ecology moved its primary office to a more efficient building with no gas emissions: heating and hot water is now delivered via a water-source heat pump, and electricity is provided by a green energy supplier. An order for an electric vehicle was also made to join the existing company owned vehicles and they will replace end-of-life vehicles with greener vehicles.

The company also sought to address the more challenging Scope 3 emissions. They have developed an internal policy and review work that is greater than 65 miles from their office location, making use of local subcontractor labour or passing over the request to a local provider. Wildwood Ecology have also developed a procurement policy for goods and services purchased, preferring to use local suppliers or those with a sustainability policy.

Based on their full emissions for 2021 (Scopes 1-3) the company off-set 20 tonnes of CO2e in 2022 and are currently carbon net-negative.

In 2022 the Managing Director became a STEM Ambassador and continued as guest lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University (Cirencester), delivering their Ecological Consultancy module to final year students. He uses these opportunities to actively promote the profession, and the role of CIEEM, to aspiring ecologists, as well as educate individuals how ecologists and environmental managers can make a positive impact in resolving global issues, including biodiversity loss and climate change.

We will be posting further information on each of the 2023 Awards Winners over on our blog.