2022 Awards Winners Spotlight: Member of the Year

Dr Martina Girvan CEcol MCIEEM

Martina is a Chartered Ecologist with over 25 years’ experience demonstrating the benefits of biodiversity for productivity, stability and resilience of ecosystem-services. Following work with the Scottish Wildlife Trust, her PhD and Post-Doc research into how soil biodiversity underpins ecosystem-services and is affected by land use resulted in four influential papers in international journals, followed by a role as Biodiversity Officer delivering the Greater Manchester BAP, undertaking biodiversity audits, creating management plans and sponsoring enhancement projects.

In 2005 she moved to consultancy, working with multidisciplinary teams delivering major projects and managing teams of ecologists and arboriculturists. She has personally delivered three award-winning projects, over 50 Ecology Chapters for major Environmental impact Assessments, over 30 Habitat Regulations Assessments, 13 major international projects and over 30 strategies and mitigation plans across all development sectors. These were centred on design and mitigation to enhance biodiversity, integrated green infrastructure and introducing the natural capital (NC) and ecosystem-service approach.

Martina has been supporting Grow2Know since 2019. Formed in the wake of the Grenfell disaster to support the recovery of the community using nature to stimulate education and wellbeing, and increase local biodiversity. She secured finance to launch their website and advises on design, health and safety, finance and stakeholder engagement, and has built relationships with partners to deliver numerous projects within the community.

Martina sits on CIEEM’s Advisory Forum and has been part of CIEEM’s Strategic Policy Panel since 2018, advising on practice and policy, attending meetings at Westminster and speaking on behalf of CIEEM at several events. As part of her policy work, Martina is an active member of CIEEM’s Environmental Net Gain (ENG) working group, is lead author for the ENG Briefing Paper and contributed to the ENG Principles.

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) has been a key area of engagement for Martina, having facilitated and presented a CIRIA BNG workshop, co-authored the BNG Principles (CIEEM, CIRIA and IEMA, 2016) and negotiated the provision of test data for the Eco-metric (now EBN tool) which she and her team have been trialling for 4 years.

Martina was a co-author of CIEEM’s Guidance on Ecological Survey and Assessment in the UK During the Covid-19 Outbreak and a member of the continuedCOVID-19 working group. She is also a member of CIEEM’s Raising Standards steering group supporting the delivery of survey standards and leading the preliminary habitats standard.

Through her work as a Chartership Assessor and with colleagues, Martina has mentored more than 50 ecologists through their CIEEM levels, including mentoring six successfully through Chartership. She has hosted seven Chartership Workshops.

We will be posting further information on each of the 2022 CIEEM Awards Winners over on our blog.