In collaboration with the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP) Centre of Excellence, researchers from across campus are excited to announce a Spring workshop series, looking into ’wicked sustainability problems’ in the context of education and research. Incorporating transdisciplinary perspectives from the School of Global Studies, School of Education and Social Work, School of Life Sciences, and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), this research workshop series will delve into global and local issues surrounding food systems, water, nature conservation and education.

In our third of the 'Wicked Sustainability Challenges' workshops, SSRP Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Biology Dr Christopher Sandom (School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex) together with Ecologist and Conservationist Tony Whitbread (Knepp, also former Chief Executive of Sussex Wildlife Trust), focus on 'wicked problems' relating to land use, biodiversity, and nature conservation.

We are standing on the precipice of a 6th mass extinction of species. If it transpires, it will be the first caused by a single species, Homo sapiens, and will in turn threaten human survival. Halting and ultimately reversing the decline in biodiversity is one of the big sustainability challenges. But the conservation and recovery of nature is a wickedly difficult problem to solve.

Nature is more than species, it encompasses everything from the diversity of genes to the variety of all the interactions between individual organisms all the way up to the different ecosystems these interactions create. This staggering diversity has been created by billions of years of ecological and evolutionary processes working as a wonderfully complex system. Humans threaten to cause the 6th mass extinction because our efforts to meet our collective and growing needs and desires are directly harming other species directly as well as consuming the resources needed to support the rest of nature.

While nature is enormously complex it also follows some simple patterns. One is known as the species-area relationship, which describes how the more space nature must function as a complex system the more species it will support. This fundamental pattern in nature stands at odds with the ever-increasing use of space by people at the expense of nature. Averting the 6th mass extinction will require humans to find ways to spare more space for nature or share the space we use with a much greater diversity of life, or, most likely, some combination of the two. But the needs of nature and people are so diverse, interconnected, and ever changing, it makes finding space for nature and living alongside nature wickedly difficult.

Come and help us unpeel this ‘wicked problem’, discuss how this relates to local landscape use in the Sussex region, and explore what potential pathways might help tackle specific biodiversity and conservation challenges across the South Coast and ultimately help move us towards a more sustainable and healthy future across the UK and our planet.

*This workshop will feature an on-campus site visit to the ‘Love Your Scrub’ initiative and the ‘Forest Food Garden’ (weather permitting).