A Converstaion with Tamma Carel, Senior Environmental Consultant

The Corporate Law Journal conducted an exclusive interview with Ms. Tamma Carel, a Senior Environmental Consultant based in the UK. Tamma Carel is a Senior Environmental Consultant and Director at Imvelo Ltd, an experienced Environmental Consultancy and Training provider which she founded herself. She took a meandering route into environmental consulting, and believes in trying out as many career paths as will eventually lead you to the right one. Tamma explains how Climate Action will have a significant positive impact on the rest of the Sustainable Development goals, and how the biggest object to sustainability is a lack of understanding due to human psychology.

Imvelo's Environmental Consultancy Services have been carefully aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and international environmental management systems.

Environmental Training has been curated to give clients the skills and confidence they need to meet and surpass their own important environmental objectives.

Tamma is a Senior Environmental Consultant: holding an MSc in Environmental Management; Practitioner Membership of IEMA (PIEMA); as well as being an IEMA/ IRCA Accredited Environmental Auditor. Tamma is also a member of the IEMA North East Steering Group, and is actively involved as a STEM Ambassador.

Would you like to tell our readers a little bit about yourself, your journey, and your background?

My name is Tamma, I am an environmental consultant and trainer, and I set up my own business, Imvelo Ltd, in 2015. Imvelo was founded with the express intention of helping businesses do better, specifically focussing on integrating the sustainable development goals into their strategic plans and their priorities, taking into consideration carbon reduction and all of the actions that are necessary to help us address the climate crisis, most importantly underpinning that consultancy work with training, knowledge, and education.

Personally, I believe that one of the biggest barriers to sustainability at the moment is that it is such a mammoth subject. It is very difficult to firstly comprehend the scale of the problem, but then also figure out what that problem means to us at individual levels and at corporate levels.

I do work at a very strategic level at the moment, but that’s actually not where I began. My aspirations to work in the environmental and sustainability sector actually date way back to my childhood: I was born and raised in South Africa, I had access to beautiful wilderness and a very close relationship with nature and with the ocean, and truthfully, it’s in my blood. I don’t think I have ever wanted to do anything different.

I did have aspirations originally to be a Marine Biologist because I love the Ocean, but actually I couldn’t get into university to do that because I wasn’t quite good enough at chemistry to get onto a marine biology degree.

I took a slightly different route and I did a joint honours at Newcastle University in Biology and Psychology. At that point I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with either of those. I figured if I stuck with a science and a humanity, I at least gave myself some options, and I got to the end of my four-year degree and was still none the wiser at all.

Throughout university, though, what I had done was take on as many opportunities as I possibly could. So, I did a lot of work in conservation, a lot of work in research: I did shark research, I worked for the Bird Wildlife Sanctuary, and I went and did some research on sugar cane fields in Barbados.

I was there for a summer holiday and found some work experience while I was there. I had this breadth of experience, very practical environmental experience, really on the ground.

I finished my degree and still didn't really know what I was going to do. I was lucky enough to get a job at Newcastle University as a Stem graduate ambassador. That job was actually quite a pinnacle moment for me because, prior to that, I hated public speaking and actually you couldn’t get me in front of an audience. There wasn’t anything you could do to convince me.

I got this job as a graduate ambassador without actually realising that the primary job was communication, engagement, and large-scale public speaking events. Thank God for that job because I had to have a word with myself, get over that gear.

If it was not for that - I speak at so many events now, I love events now. I was 21, I was a really late bloomer on that. It was really sad. Now give me a microphone and I am absolutely in my element. But that job was great, it taught me about working, what that responsibility was, and it really built some skills that I did not know I was missing.

From that I then decided to go back to university and I did a master’s in environmental management. Up until going through my master’s, I don't think I even fully comprehended how many different routes you could take in a career in sustainability, and I basically went through my whole master’s pretty confident that marine biology wasn't where I was going to go.

I was actually going to work in agriculture. I really liked the idea of sustainable food for a growing population. I did my dissertation on earthworms and soil health and it was amazing.

I got out of my master’s and I actually got a job in agricultural research. I started that job in October and by December realised that I was not built to work outdoors in the UK in winter.

Truthfully, I was miserable. It was so cold; I was always outside. I had chilblains on my cheeks and on my fingers and it was such a trauma because I was like, ‘Well, I am too soft, I can't do this. This is not making me happy – as much as I want to do the work, the environment just really doesn’t suit me’. So I decided that I needed something that was going to give me some time indoors, but still give me access to the outdoors.

Then I got my first job as an environmental consultant for a small firm in Newcastle, and that was where I began to learn about business, the environment, and sustainability. I learned a lot about environmental legislation through that business, about environmental management systems, and again about the importance of education for sustainability. I worked there for nearly five years – I absolutely loved that job.

An opportunity arose where I was actually able to go to a really big developer and be their in-house senior environmental manager for a huge development that was taking place on the Humber Estuary. That was fascinating because then I started to learn about how regulators interact with businesses, the processes that businesses have to go through to meet environmental conditions, and how complicated that framework is, and I was really beginning to understand also that triple bottom line of sustainability – how people, planet and profit are always, always fighting against each other.

It was a really tough environment; a really demanding environment but really the steepest and probably best learning curve that I've had. What I find really interesting about that job is when I interviewed, they asked me if I had ever done anything like that before and I said, ‘Absolutely not, however, I have absolute confidence in my ability to figure it out. I can learn. Whatever I don't know I will learn’.

That was really funny because they said that that was what got me the job, even though I fully had no idea how to do what they were asking me to do. Again, that was a turning point because I just realised that to have a career in sustainability it is basically constantly doing stuff that you don't know how to do because it’s always changing.

I had a good time with that, and then it was chance and circumstance that I was having a conversation with someone and they said to me, ‘Oh, imagine if you could run your own business’, and I laughed at them. Then, pretty much 12 hours later I had registered the company, because the more it went through my head with all the reasons why I couldn't do it, the list for all the reasons why I could do it was just so much stronger.

Ultimately, I thought there was nothing to lose – worst case, I'll get another job. I might have to eat beans on toast for a while but to be honest, that's the reality of setting up a company anyway, so let's see what happens.

That was 2015 and here we are. We are still standing, doing really well. Obviously last year was challenging, as it was for everybody, but the route to recovery is well underway and I'm working on some very exciting projects with some very exciting clients. I am just buzzing, feeling hopeful, excited, and also open to whatever the future of sustainability looks like. I don't believe that this is where I'm going to end up anyway.

I do believe the lessons about what you don’t love are just as important as the lessons about what you do love. The longest relationship you are ever going to have in your life is with your career. It is something that takes time to figure out, and if I could have a word with my 18-year-old self and say, ‘just chill out and trust the process’, that's exactly what I would do.

Could you simplify SDGs for our readers?

So, the Sustainable Development Goals are an international agreement which means that every country in the world has agreed to help achieve the 17 most pressing priorities for the future of humanity. Basically the SDGs are 17 goals that provide a roadmap to what true sustainability could look like whilst considering the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.

Do you think there are certain goals in today’s climate that require more attention than others?

That is such a hard question. The way that the SDGs are supposed to be interpreted is that they are all equal. When we talk about true sustainability we talk about this triple bottom line people, planet, profit, and it’s considered a three-legged stool because if either of those are not given enough attention or given too much attention, we cannot achieve sustainability; the system will topple.

The SDGs are just an expansion of those three core principles. When we think academically about sustainability, we should be taking all 17 goals to be equally important and equally pressing.

However, I personally feel that the goal for climate action is the one that underpins them all, simply because people need three things to survive at the most basic level: we need clean air, we need clean food, and we need clean water. The planet provides those things.

With the climate crisis we are interfering with those essential needs for our own survival. If you think that we depend on the planet, out of a strong environment strong individuals and communities are built; out of strong individuals and communities, strong businesses and sustainable businesses are built.

I think the whole system sits on the goal for climate action, but I am an environmentalist and I’m very biased. I also think that in achieving climate action, it will have the most significant positive impact on the rest of the Sustainable Development goals.

Are there any projects currently that you are working on? Any notable ones that you would like to mention or talk about a bit more?

Obviously last year was a weird year. When Imvelo was set up in 2015, our primary focus was on environmental legislation, actually - helping businesses have access to and understand over 200 pieces of environmental law in the UK and, more importantly, what they mean for the business. Businesses were always contacting me primarily out of a need, a desire, to not break the law, to at a minimum be compliant with what the law says they should be doing in terms of their activities through the business.

It got a little quiet last year, mostly because people were, as all of us were, just revaluating absolutely everything. But come 2021, the businesses that are approaching me are coming with ambition. It’s more than compliant now. They really realised, and I think if there’s any positive to take out of COVID it was the humbling, that humanity needed to realise how dependent we are on this planet.

What it has done, which is amazing, is that people want action and they want it now because they don't want to see this happen again. We don't want this to happen again and we realise that we have to do something about it, and also that collective action and a global effort is the best way to address global challenges, of which the climate crisis remains the biggest one that we've got.

It's really exciting to see quite a significant upturn in projects like carbon footprinting and carbon reduction strategies, directly tackling that SDG for Climate Action. There is also an upturn in ESG projects which actually is all about business transparency, being accountable to stakeholders, and about giving sustainability the same kind of clout in the business as financial criteria, and then also those social factors which have historically always been a little harder to measure.

It is really exciting that businesses are coming forward and saying, right, we know this needs a plan, we need to measure carbon, we need a strategy, we need to get our governance sorted and we want to be leaders and ambassadors for sustainability in our industries. Really all across the sector is super exciting right now.

I think the flip side of that is that my services that I am doing now have changed to what I was doing twelve months ago. Again, that is something I'd love your graduates to keep in mind – I wish we could tell you what jobs are going to be available to you in the future. The truth is we have no idea.

Even more of a truth is that you are going to create the job by just doing what you're interested in, finding a problem and trying to solve it. Those are the careers that are going to come off the back of this. There are endless opportunities. Follow the passion.

What are some day-to-day obstacles that you face, and how do you tackle them?

I really do think that the biggest barrier is that people don't understand sustainability and what that looks like as an end goal. They feel it’s something we do. Actually, sustainability is something we're aiming for; we're trying to achieve that. It’s not something we do, there’s a lot we have to do to actually get there.

Then I think there’s the limitations of human psychology. This is a big problem and it’s an overwhelming problem at an individual level. It feels very difficult to actually do something about it, to make a change. It's why the education element is so important to the services that I offer because I want to help break down those big problems to individual solutions so that people can feel empowered and feel knowledgeable, but more so that they can really see that what you do personally will make a difference – we are all parts of a whole.

It all contributes to the bigger picture and what you need to do is concentrate on what you’re doing, what you can control, what you can influence and the choices that you make. If everybody felt empowered to make informed decisions, then we would be a lot further down the road. I think that's the barrier.

Working in businesses is challenging because there are a lot of competing needs, priorities, requirements, and resource limitations. But I personally think that's the part of my job that I love. I’m always problem solving: right, how do we figure out how to get this in so that people almost don't notice that we put it in. We just fish it into the business processes. They keep doing what they're doing and we can extrapolate the information that we need to do.

So that's probably the challenge. It’s just taking everybody's needs and expectations into consideration and then still giving them something useful at the end of it. That's what I strive to do.

Do you have any advice for young women who would like to enter this industry and who would like to work as environmental consultants?

Number one advice to everybody is just do what you're driven by. It really is as simple as that. If you're looking for careers in sustainability, the opportunities are truly endless. Test it out, try it out.

LinkedIn is a very powerful resource to connect with professionals and at your stage if you're looking for things that might interest you, search job title, search keywords, search companies that you might be attracted to. See what they're doing, figure out the type of project that they're working on, and then have a think about how you can develop your skills for a career in sustainability.

I did a careers event yesterday, and one of the key takeaways from that was that if you’re trying to break into the sustainability sector, there’s no expectation actually that you’ve got work experience in this because it is limited.

Even when I graduated, nobody told me I could be an environmental consultant in the way that I am. I don't think it really existed. People aren't looking for exact experience; they are looking for key transferable skills – what it takes to work in sustainability.

Really it does come down to those things like problem solving and being proactive. Communication is key because you will talk to a lot of different people, right from the CEO of a multi-million-pound multinational organization, right down to contractors, the guys on the factory floor, the cleaners that come in, because every single one of them has a role to play in sustainability. How you communicate with them and what you communicate to them is a skill to develop.

Talking to different people and making sure that you win them; it’s winning hearts and minds for sustainability. Think about those. Even if you have got a job as a barista, the skills in customer services, talking to lots of different people, following processes, creating quality products, all of that is valuable for sustainability. Really focus on skills, not so much on job titles.

Purpose and passion; those are literally what is driving all of us. So, if there’s a fire in your belly and you’re prepared to learn, that is all we are looking for.

Interviewed by Prerna Deep

This article stems from a video interview conducted by Prerna Deep, that has been later transcribed by Oscar Wilton.