The search for Britain’s lost rainforests and the battle to save them

Fragments of temperate rainforest turn successful parts of England, Wales and Scotland, and with the close enactment we could assistance them thrive

Environment 28 November 2022

By Guy Shrubsole

Black Tor Beare, a rainforest connected Dartmoor in south-west England

Guy Shrubsole

FOR astir of my life, I didn’t realise that Britain has rainforests. But then, 2 years ago, I moved to Devon. Exploring woods successful forgotten valleys and steep-sided gorges, I recovered places exuberant with life.

I witnessed branches dripping with mosses and trees festooned with lichens and liverworts. Even successful winter, erstwhile deciduous trees suffer their leaves, these woodlands were greenish with a verdant luminosity owed to the plethora of taxon clinging to them. My adventures took maine to places that felt similar greenish cathedrals. Sunlight picked retired the arches of histrion trunks with their haloes of moss.

I was enraptured. Surely, I thought, specified affluent woodland belongs successful the tropics, not the UK. But it is true. The British Isles harbour fragments of a globally uncommon habitat: temperate rainforest.

While tropical rainforests are characterised by being rainy and hot, temperate rainforests are rainy but cool. They are rarer than the tropical variety, covering conscionable 1 per cent of the world’s surface. They can’t lucifer Amazonia for scale, but these habitats nevertheless teem with taxon and whitethorn beryllium important c sinks.

Tragically, however, the British Isles person mislaid astir of their rainforests to deforestation. In England, Scotland and Wales, the remaining fragments full astatine astir 130,000 hectares. But determination is anticipation for their future. With the close action, I judge the country they screen could treble wrong a procreation – and that by helping these rainforests flourish, the UK would nonstop a almighty connection connected the value of protecting rainforests the …