Tom Badham-Thornhill

About

I've spent fifteen years managing complex programmes in some of the world's most difficult environments. Refugee camps in Iraq, Bangladesh, Yemen and Lebanon. Emergency responses built from nothing under pressure. Systems that didn't exist until someone built them.

The thread running through all of it is the same: making things work at scale, in conditions where the infrastructure isn't there yet. In Bangladesh, I inherited operational challenges across five refugee camps housing 180,000 people. I built a workflow management tool to bring order to it. It got adopted across all 17 IOM camps in the region. That's the kind of problem I'm drawn to.

I hold a BSc in Physical Geography from the University of Exeter, with a dissertation on prehistoric peat formations in the Isles of Scilly, completed as part of the Lyonesse Project. Climate systems, carbon cycles and the long ecological history of upland landscapes aren't abstract to me. I've been interested in this since before it was a career.

More recently, as Director of Development for an eco-tourism business in Sri Lanka, I've been working on biodiversity restoration, landscape management and community engagement, translating long-term environmental objectives into practical delivery. I'm now back in the UK, based in Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor, and looking for roles where that combination of operational experience and environmental grounding is genuinely useful.

What I do well: I set up systems that hold, build teams that work independently, and turn complicated multi-stakeholder situations into clear decisions. I've managed projects worth $13m, led teams of 600, and worked with UN agencies, governments, NGOs and communities across four continents. PRINCE2 Agile certified, methodical about risk, stubborn about follow-through.

I'm particularly interested in conservation, landscape restoration and nature recovery, and equally in climate change, sustainability and green energy. What these have in common is that they need people who can manage complex programmes, build systems that hold, and bring stakeholders with very different priorities into alignment. That's what I've spent fifteen years doing. Open to project management, operations and stakeholder engagement roles in the UK, with a focus on the South West.