Dr Will Lock

Will's electric bike.

San Martín, Peru

The theme of the International Day of Forests 2025, on Friday 21 March, is Forests and Food, celebrating the vital roles that forests play in food security and livelihoods. But forests are also crucial in so many other areas including biodiversity, soil fertility and carbon storage, not to mention their numerous social benefits.

So, what do forests mean to us today and how do they fit into the broader political debate around climate change and climate justice? Does planting trees offer us a potential  solution to address the climate crisis, or is it more complicated?

Dr. Will Lock, Assistant Professor in Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies, is one of a number of researchers at the University of Sussex exploring the changing role of forests and how humans interact with them. This fits into an approach known as political ecology, which encourages us to consider the big questions of how we interact with the natural world, landscapes and the spaces co-created between humans and nature.

Tree planting: Solution or Problem?

Will’s work has taken him from the Peruvian Amazon to the valleys of Carmarthenshire in South Wales to understand how trees and forests are being framed in carbon offsetting or nature-based solutions projects. His doctoral fieldwork, working within a suite of carbon-offsetting projects in the region of San Martín in Peru explored how reforestation tended towards intensive plantations with very few different species. It highlighted some of the issues with treating the natural world as ‘a solution’ and the unexpected effects of asking nature to work harder and faster to compensate for continued emissions and consumption.

Will is now looking at similar issues in Carmarthenshire, where farmland is increasingly being bought up by large investors, asset managers and wealthy individuals for reforestation projects. His current research project Land Restoration and Carbon Conflicts in Welsh Farming Communities, funded by an ESRC New Investigator Grant examines how this trend is driving conflict in rural communities and how the subsequent reforestation plantations can negatively impact local livelihoods and food systems when they displace farming communities.

Collaborative Research and Education

Will’s research is the product of a long-standing research interest in the politics of forests at the University of Sussex. and a number of cross campus initiatives seeking to understand climate change in an interdisciplinary way. He has worked closely with colleagues across Global Studies, MAH, ESW and Life Sciences and strongly believes that this interdisciplinarity is at the very core of how we can approach the interconnected environmental, social and climate crises in a holistic manner. This includes working with groups outside of the University, whether unions, social movements, activists, policymakers, businesses or other organisations.

As one of the co-conveners of the brand new Climate Justice, Sustainability and Development BA Will wants students to also be able to adopt this approach of working critically, collaboratively and creatively when thinking about climate change. The new course will help students to understand not just the science of climate change, but the justice implications and the societal impacts of the causes, effects and proposed solutions. As with forests, we don’t see the wood for the trees if we fixate on carbon metrics and profit at the expense of broader understandings of how we live with the natural world.

Climate Justice and Green Skills

Future graduates hoping to drive social change are going to need not only knowledge, but the green skills, values and attitudes to allow them to thrive in a warming world. Building on the range of sustainability teaching on campus that exists already, the new degree is designed with this in mind and will equip our students with as many tools as possible to do so.

For Will, more importantly, it also provides us all with a way to understand the world in greater depth and engage with the variety of initiatives pushing back against false solutions and creating alternative systems in the here and now. Indeed, while trees may not be the simple solution to all our problems, they are still at the heart of much resistance, community-building and joy.

So, on the UN International Day of Forests why not take a walk up into Stanmer Park? Enjoy the beautiful woodland surrounding the campus and give some thought to the trees as companions, not just service providers!

Further reading:

Lock, W. (2024), Enriching Carbon: Surplus Value Creation and Capture on the Voluntary Carbon Markets.

Lock, W. (2023) Producing nature-based solutions: infrastructural nature and agrarian change in San Martín, Peru

BBC: Tree-planting: Why are large investment firms buying Welsh farms?

FT: The illusion of a trillion trees

REDD Monitor: “Worse than doing nothing”: Shell’s REDD offsets in Indonesia and Peru