Principal Sustainability Expert - Land & Agriculture

Principal Sustainability Expert - Land & Agriculture

Quantis

Lausanne or Zurich, Switzerland

DOES THIS DESCRIBE YOU AND YOUR NEXT ROLE?

The Principal Sustainability Consultant, Land & Agriculture sits within the Quantis community of Expertise for Land & Agriculture and joins the other experts in supporting the community and beyond. Quantis communities are groups of people who share knowledge, innovate, solve problems and develop a collective and strategic voice to reach Quantis’ full potential to transform business. This expert role is to support the communities in delivering materials and managing knowledge to improve development and delivery of Quantis services.

The mission of the Sustainability Expert, Land & Agriculture is to maintain Quantis at the cutting edge of the area of expertise to maximize the quality and impact of our advice to transform our clients, and to continuously improve our offerings.

What is expected of you:

A Principal Sustainability Expert Consultant, Land & Agriculture is responsible for (1) applying technical engineering or agronomic expertise to ensure quality delivery (2) developing transformational service offerings to meet evolving clients’ needs based on 8+ years of experience working in corporate accountability and (3) leveraging excellent communication skills and professional posture to collaborate with clients, Quantis colleagues, and partners. Principal experts at Quantis master the technical details of land related environmental impacts and risk assessments and can communicate to a wide range of audiences and maintain a pragmatic business view without being tangled in the weeds of technical details.

What you do:

This role serves Quantis clients, such as multinational companies in the 3 focus sectors of Quantis (i.e., Food & Beverage, Fashion & Sporting Goods and Cosmetics & Personal Care), facing key land and agriculture related challenges. As a principal expert you are active in direct client-facing discussions, create high-quality deliverables often for more senior management audiences, and also work behind the scenes to provide thought leadership and technical and quality control to project deliverables and support for more junior colleagues. Principal experts are expected to be able to go out of their comfort zone to learn and master new topics as the field and our client needs change. In addition to client work, experts contribute to internal knowledge building through participation in the Quantis Community of Expertise for Land & Agriculture which is a group of motivated consultants focused on advancing new innovative and transformative solutions in land & agriculture in their client-facing work.

Your mission:

The mission of the Principal Sustainability Expert, Land & Agriculture is to maintain Quantis at the cutting edge of the area of expertise to maximize the quality and impact of our advice to transform our clients, and to continuously improve our offerings.

DOES THIS DESCRIBE YOU AND YOUR NEXT ROLE?

• You are a well-organized person who can prioritize tasks well, especially when under time pressure.
• You have the ability and affinity to work on multiple projects simultaneously.
• You are a team player that works quickly, independently and on schedule.
• You’re motivated to put your expertise to work towards our mission to align consumer goods companies with planetary boundaries.
• For 8+ years (including a master or PhD degree), you’ve been sharpening your skills and technical expertise in a professional setting, with some experience in the consulting or private sector.
• You have a strong scientific background and understanding of the relation between agricultural practices and climate, biodiversity, and water impacts, and improvement levers; while also recognizing the main limitations of current environmental accounting methodologies when it comes to agricultural practices.
• You have experienced linking agriculture to different sustainability topics such as climate, water and biodiversity and know quantification methods in these fields.
• You have a science-based orientation, and a deep intellectual and business curiosity, combined with strong interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate complex information in clear, understandable ways to internal and external audiences.
• You can provide subject matter expertise in agriculture, including but not limited to, on-farm data collection, improved agricultural practices and farmer training. You can do this both at the field-level and at the corporate level (e.g. advise across 100,000+ farms).
• You are able to provide senior level subject matter expertise on land use and land use change related topics, including but not limited to: Agricultural management practices, farm-level assessments, annual and perennial cropping systems, regenerative agriculture, soil carbon accounting, carbon sequestration, biogenic carbon emissions, land use change, deforestation, watershed management, water impact assessment, and forestry management.
• You are familiar or comfortable with most common guidelines, frameworks, and relevant regulations in the sustainability space, including but not limited to: GHG Protocol, SBTi & SBTi FLAG, Value Change Initiative (VCI), Accountability Framework Initiative, EU Deforestation Regulation, certifications (e.g. Rainforest Alliance, Organic Certified), carbon credit market and program requirements, and more.
• You are experienced with applying your knowledge in agronomy, fertilizer management systems, crop rotation management, or related subjects in order to advise and ultimately measure improvements via impact reduction and removals (e.g. carbon sequestration).
• You are dedicated to the deep reduction of fossil resource use, and agrochemical application as well as the elimination of deforestation.
• You are at ease with the drivers of deforestation and Land Use Change for agriculture, and technical challenges in solving those issues.
• You have a good understanding of what drives environmental impact of agricultural commodities production, and deep experience in one of them (e.g., cocoa, coffee, dairy, wheat, maize, soy, palm oil; etc.).
• You have a good understanding or technical knowledge in carbon accounting, crop modeling, primary data gathering and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
• You are motivated for teamwork and supporting a team.
• You’re able to use your experience to provide technical support, coaching, and technical review both internally and externally.
• You have demonstrated the ability to coach, teach, and mentor others with your knowledge and skills.
• You get excited about guiding companies to understand and design transformative and science-based strategy.
• Fluent in English. German and/or French is a strong asset.

AS A PRINCIPAL EXPERT, HERE’S A PREVIEW OF WHAT TYPE OF WORK YOUR DAYS WILL INCLUDE:

• Contribute to the delivery of multiple projects with varying degrees of responsibilities including serving as the principal SME, providing support as an additional expert, or contributing to delivery on a specific task.
• Audit deliverables created by team members for clients to ensure deliverables are of quality, achieve scientific rigor, and meet client needs.
• Lead the development of solutions at the branch level together with Project Managers and Strategists to ensure Quantis is providing comprehensive and innovative approaches to address evolving client challenges.
• Share and develop knowledge for topics related to agricultural practices such as regenerative and precision agriculture, fertilizer management, on-farm energy use and production, yield optimization, cover and rotational crops, and other agricultural practices and ensuring internal consistency and excellence of the Quantis approach on these topics.

ADDITIONAL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

• Familiarity with agricultural land management tools and methods such as Cool Farm Tool (CFT), FieldPrint, DNDC (DeNitrification-DeComposition), DAYCENT, remote sensing, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), and knowledge of soil science will be considered a plus.
• Consulting experience or agriculture, sustainability or procurement position held within a large food company.
• Specific commodity experience (cocoa, coffee, soy, sugar, wheat, dairy, meat).

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