Tim Norman: Podcast Q&A

Our latest guest on How to Avoid Moving to Mars is Tim Norman, an expert in offshore infrastructure and renewables with over 30 years of experience in the sector. 

Tim is UK Director, Vice President for Offshore at NIRAS Group, an international consultancy that has worked on more than 40GW of wind projects in the UK, Europe and Asia. Tim also previously worked at The Crown Estates, leading the delivery of strategic spatial planning and consenting advice to The Marine Estate for renewables and other activities.

Tim and David initially met as environmental consultants, both focused on understanding the ecological impact of infrastructure development. As a solution-orientated person, Tim was a natural guest for How to Avoid Moving to Mars.

Tell us about your role at NIRAS Group

We’re a foundation owned by employees, so there are no shareholders. It's very much a purpose-led organisation, committed to bringing about a sustainable society. 

Our mission guides a lot of what we do. Because we work globally, we work in the developing world as well, and our work internationally tells us that action needs to be done at scale.

What are some more of the key takeaways from your role?

We see time and time again that in environmental communities, people do things that make them feel good, but aren’t meaningful for the planet.

We’re currently facing big issues that require national levels of coordinated and regulated approaches. Plus, you also have to put the dollar value on it, which is a sobering way to look at it, but we need to know the cost of reversing biodiversity loss. 

I feel strongly that if you can create a market whereby you can channel money into what we need to do, then that is the way we will achieve biodiversity restoration. 

How are you feeling about the current issues we’re facing in the environmental space?

I’ve always sought to be positive, and I think if we can get the correct mechanisms in place then our ability to respond is incredibly good. 

What is also encouraging is that offshore wind was a fringe activity when I started. Now, it's probably the single most important initiative for climate change mitigation‌, showing that once a monetary value is placed on a cause, it really can grow to extreme prevalence. 

Now, we just need to decide how we can get more of that sort of capital into the environment. The work of Environment Bank has been crucial because people are now thinking about nature restoration as a market-based idea.

As part of your long career, you’ve worked at a senior level in the Crown Estate. Tell us more about the environmental work happening there.

The Crown Estate owns large tracts of the foreshore around the UK and is the owner of the seabed itself out to 12 nautical miles. And then beyond that, to the edge of the economic zone, they own the rights to renewable development. 

The Crown Estate was handed the job of licensing activities on the seabed, including offshore wind, which has been very influential. I got involved around 2008 when we were challenging our understanding of what kind of impact this sort of development could have on the marine environment. 

We considered the effects on habitats and marine life, which became a key focus of our activity and we strategically considered how infrastructure plans like offshore wind programmes could impact the network of protected sites and habitats.

What you've been doing in the most recent part of your career has been building serious renewable facilities, which is critical if we're going to address the issues around climate change. But doesn’t that also raise significant potential impacts on nature conservation?

There's a lot of anxiety about certain types of development. 

We see big structures in the sea and think they must have a lot of impact. And my view is that we should talk about the science and look at the evidence. 

At the same time, if you're trying to deliver infrastructure to meet climate change mitigation requirements and Net Zero targets, you don't want to reject a good project because of inaccurate assumptions that lead to adverse impact assessment conclusions.

I remain unconvinced that we will meet the 1.5C target, which is very scary. But there are a lot of narratives now around how we invest in biodiversity restoration. It's no good just doing no net loss or net zero for biodiversity, you've got to go beyond that. The time is now.

I've certainly felt that net gain requirements should be extended into infrastructure development and the marine environment. There's a lot of thinking going on around what that looks like and we have to understand that when development comes along. 

It’s also important to bear in mind that infrastructure has only one impact on the marine environment, there are other bigger, regulated activities that have a much bigger effect, like fishing. 

The big potential gain is through regulating that and how to drive it. The industry would say it is already doing a lot of those things. Certainly, the people that we tend to work with at NIRAS are very interested in being good citizens in the marine environment. We need some way of delivering measurable biodiversity benefits that can be delivered sensibly at scale. 

What would you say to people who perhaps don't believe that nature’s decline is real and caused by humans? 

Some people react to catastrophic news with denial, as a psychological reaction to being confronted. But informed people understand the evidence and that is an issue we need to address. 

We can’t put our efforts into stopping them from denying things like biodiversity loss, but creating a plan to move forward with those who are aware of what we face realistically is the best approach. 

If you had to put your finger on it, what would you think might be the single most important thing that could be done to reverse biodiversity loss?

It's not an action. It's an attitude. 

We can't just expect the way things have worked in the past to deliver the solutions that we need now. We have to be open to new ideas for solving these kinds of problems.

Conservation in Britain has been seen as holding the line against certain types of development, it has previously been very much around preservation and how you preserve certain things. 

Battling biodiversity loss is a reframing of that, it's about adding to what is being preserved, rather than simply preserving what is there already. We need much bigger systemic changes and we need a strong, robust plan of how we will deliver these changes at scale.