Working 40 metres in the air to support unique woodland research

On leaving school in Stafford and not being set on any particular field, 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) 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 was 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 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".



Tom's main role as an apprentice engineer was looking 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.

When applying for the role, Downes told interviews 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. 

Downes finished his apprenticeship at the end of June, and has since landed the job of BiFOR's senior engineering technician. His day-to-day work is "the same as before, but much more in depth” - challenging to be thrown into a position of greater responsibility, but "very enjoyable". He now has a permanent role at the University of Birmingham, with the experiment due to run for another six years. "The apprenticeship was a good way to get into something," he says.

Recent tasks have included overhauling the IT operating system at the site, the software and hardware for which are more than 30 years old. In November each year, the experiment is temporarily suspended and over the winter Downes and his colleagues have "a lot of work to do with infrastructure maintenance. There's always things going on - we're equally busy in a different kind of way".



“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 calls himself “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.



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.