Conservationists are fighting to restore and expand the last remaining fragments of the UK’s rare temperate rainforest as climate change looms.
Wildlife experts describe temperate rainforest – a globally rare habitat that once swathed western coasts of England, Wales, Scotland, the island of Ireland and the Isle of Man – as the “jewel in the crown” of the country’s landscapes but warn they are a pale shadow of their former selves.
The area of Britain covered by these woodlands has shrunk from a fifth to just 1%, cleared for timber, commercial forestry and agriculture.
They are now found only in fragments that face multiple threats including isolation, invasive species and rising temperatures which put their unique micro-climate at risk.
Conservationists say scaling up and connecting areas of healthy rainforest habitat, by planting native trees and enabling natural regeneration of the woodlands and species that grow in them, is crucial to making sure they and the wildlife they support can survive in the face of climate change.
Restoring these ancient woodlands can also play a role in tackling climate change, storing carbon and reducing run-off and flooding caused by increasingly heavy rainstorms, they argue.
Efforts under way include a £38.9 million, 100-year programme by the Wildlife Trusts, funded by insurance giant Aviva, to restore 1,755 hectares (4,337 acres) of rainforest along the Atlantic coastline, from Cornwall to Scotland, including Wales, Isle of Man and Northern Ireland.
The Wildlife Trusts is also taking a rainforest garden to Chelsea Flower Show, which they have announced will be rehomed at the Bristol Zoo Project after the world famous horticultural event, in an effort to raise awareness of the rare habitat.
Tara Cummins, co-ordinator of the Aviva temperate rainforest programme at the Wildlife Trusts, which is working with local and national wildlife trusts to deliver the scheme, said: “The aim is to go beyond traditional habitat restoration, creating entirely new rainforest.”
Ms Cummins said temperate rainforests needed “incredibly specific conditions to grow”, with steady temperatures and a good level of rainfall.
But she said: “With climate change those conditions are found in less and less areas.”
So expanding the habitat – and linking up with existing patches of rainforest – is key to ensure the woods and their wildlife can survive the changing climate.
The programme comes at a time of debate over the use of land, with pressure for food security, development, nature restoration, climate targets and energy.
But Ms Cummins said the scheme was targeting only land that was not valuable for food production, such as heavily degraded land, which had been sitting on the market for several years.
And she said: “Restoring these habitats and wild places is critical for climate change, which is also critical for guaranteeing food security,” with the woodlands storing carbon and slowing the flow of water to curb flooding.
The programme has nine sites so far, with seven locations already announced, including Skiddaw in Cumbria, which will eventually look to plant 300,000 trees over 270 hectares and restore around 400 hectares of blanket bog.
Elsewhere, Creg y Cowin, on the Isle of Man, was the first site to plant trees in the programme.
And in Devon, more than 7,000 trees have been planted at Bowden Pillars on the edges of the Dart river valley this winter, to create new rainforest close to existing examples of the ancient wooded landscape.
Not far away, a temperate rainforest nature reserve in the Dart Valley managed by Devon Wildlife Trust shows how rich the habitat can be.
Even in early spring before the trees come into leaf, the woodlands hugging the hills around the Dart are a bright green, with rocks, tree trunks and branches festooned with mosses, liverworts and ferns and an array of lichen.
The river is home to rare brown trout and otters, while birds including red start, pied flycatchers and red-listed lesser spotted woodpeckers are also found here, along with adders, hazel dormice and common lizards.
Pine martens have been reintroduced in the area, and it is one of only a handful of sites that is home to the blue ground beetle.
Peter Burgess, director of nature recovery at Devon Wildlife Trust, said temperate rainforest such as in the Dart valley is “the jewel in the crown of habitats we’ve got in the country, but they’re so much smaller, a pale shadow of their former selves”.
He said there was a need for a critical mass of rainforest to create healthy habitat in the face of recent severe droughts and damaging floods, and future predictions that these will worsen.
“Scale is so important,” he said, with larger and more complex woodlands more resilient and more likely to return to health than smaller, isolated patches, while rare and threatened wildlife would be able to find niches in larger woods to better weather climate-driven weather extremes.
“The precious and fragile areas which remain need to be increased in size, their condition improved, and fragmented woodlands joined up to ensure they are resilient and can thrive long into the future,” he said.
The rainforest project is part of a £100 million programme by Aviva of projects in UK and Ireland using nature to tackle climate change and it is expected to remove 800,000 tonnes of emissions over 100 years.
Claudine Blamey, chief sustainability officer with Aviva, said: “This seemed like an amazing project to actually reinstate temperate rainforests across the west side of the UK, and to bring back that diversity that isn’t there, such an important biodiversity, that the UK will benefit from as climate starts to change, as we start to see more and more impacts from climate change.”
She said it was “logic” as an insurance company to understand the role nature could play in protecting habitats, homes, areas and communities, and to use it to help with the worsening impacts of climate change.
Natural solutions such as restoring habitat could be part of the solution to issues such as flooding, she said.
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