Working 40 metres in the air to support unique woodland research
On leaving school in Stafford and not being set on any particular field, Tom Downes went to music college for a year. Then he worked in a variety of jobs – in a bar, in offices, in a warehouse and on production lines.
He has always been an outdoors person, spending lots of time in Cannock Chase and going camping in Scotland. When asked about career plans, he used to say he had no idea, but he could always see himself working for the Forestry Commission.
A family friend told him about the opportunity to apply for an apprenticeship at the University of Birmingham’s Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR)’s woodland site at Norbury Junction on the Shropshire-Staffordshire border. It was just 20 minutes down the road, but not somewhere he had ever heard of before.
“Obviously my apprenticeship is pretty unique,” Downes says. “I don't think I know anyone who works at a site similar to this”. The so-called Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment facility exposing trees to heightened levels of CO2 is one of only two in the world located in a mature forest, rather than in a lab or open landscape (the other is just outside Sydney). Six arrays of towers pump either CO2 or ambient air around the oak woodland, which also contains hazel, sycamore and hawthorn.
Alongside working in the wood, Downes has studied general engineering one day a week at Solihull College - a brand new discipline for him when he started at the Institute. “It’s been very challenging,” he says – “very maths-based, and whenever you’re not doing maths, you’re doing physical studies rooted in maths, eg thermodynamics”. He found the practical machine shop work in his first year useful and refreshing: “something completely different, you can only learn it by doing it".
The main role of an apprentice engineer is to look after the facility’s instrumentation and CO2 system. There are 130 tonnes of liquid CO2 on site always in use. Six people work full-time at the facility. Downes often climbs one of the 25 metre or 40 metre towers which diffuse the CO2.
The apprenticeship includes training to work at height with wind gauges and all the correct climbing equipment. Downes told interviewers when he was going for the role that he had a “healthy amount of fear of heights”. After lots of swaying in his early climbs, “it got a lot easier,” he said, including getting used to close passes by low-flying helicopters.
He started the apprenticeship in challenging circumstances at the start of the first Covid lockdown on 1 April 2020. The BIFoR facility was still open, operating two days a week. By summer 2020, it was back to normal.
“In a way, BIFoR is the largest climate change experiment in the world, in terms of the scale and scope of the site,” Downes says. “There’s so many people from different countries and universities in one place.
Downes describes himself as “quite passionate about the environment and aware about climate change. It's good to be working somewhere where in a small way you're getting involved”.
He recognises the struggle that a lot of people have with climate change and environmental issues. He reasons this may be down to the fact that, because of where they live, they are “probably not connected to the natural world and it feels quite separate from their own lives. If they realised the connection, they would realise the severity of the issue”.
He urges town and city-dwellers to get outdoors when they can, even to the local park, to enjoy the benefits of clearing their heads and improved wellbeing as well as getting closer to nature. People can come to the BIFoR woodland on a pre-booked tour, and it is often engineers like Downes who lead these, with school groups and local authority staff among typical visitors.
Looking ahead, Downes hopes to work somewhere where he can be outside at least some of the time, and aims to find roles where he can bring his engineering know-how and forestry skills together.
Green Careers Week is a national campaign to encourage young people to consider the huge range of roles in different sectors that help communities and the planet, and the study and training pathways to access them.
In its 2023 Net Zero Workforce report, the Climate Change Committee estimated that up to 725,000 new jobs in low carbon industries could be created by the end of the decade, while WPI Economics said there would potentially be 505,000 jobs in green priority sectors by 2030 – a growth rate of nearly 6 per cent a year. But a green career is wider than that: any job or role that contributes to preserving or restoring the environment, and in any industry, not just those seen as “green”.
Visit greencareershub.com to access the latest resources and information.
