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The Lost Rainforests of Britain

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The project sees Aviva partner with The Wildlife Trusts, a federation of 46 local Wildlife Trusts that care for more than 2,300 nature reserves in the UK with local communities at their heart. It aims to re-establish temperate rainforest by planting a combination of native tree species including oak, birch, holly, rowan, alder and willow trees across an area equivalent to around 2,600 football pitches or around 5,200 acres. We help our 18.7 million customers make the most out of life, plan for the future, and have the confidence that if things go wrong we’ll be there to put it right. He is also keen to point out that temperate rainforests can also help to reconnect the British public with the nature that's found on their doorstep. "Rainforests may seem exotic," said Shrubsole, "yet they're a deep part of Britain's heritage. Given how rainy our climate is, they're as British as a cup of tea." As an adult, he has worked as a campaigner for Friends of the Earth and Rewilding Britain but it was when he moved to Wales to work for a small charity, the Public Interest Research Centre, based in Machynlleth, that he discovered lost rainforests.

Temperate rainforests would have been felled as long ago as the Bronze Age to clear space for farming. That’s understandable. What’s more tragic is what has happened in recent decades. We still had more of these rainforests up until recent times, but when the Forestry Commission was formed in the early 20th century, it decided to fell old ancient woodland and planted conifers instead. Beefsteak fungus growing in a temperate rainforest in Wales. What inspired you to advocate for Britain’s rainforests? Wistman’s Wood: even the name of this ancient oak-tree grove on Dartmoor seems to conjure spirits. As someone who grew up nearby, I remember tales of hellhounds and spectral riders winding through its twisted trees – perfect fodder for sleepovers. Yet more than the ghosts, it was the wood itself – an other-worldly tangle of low-hanging branches laden with moss and lichens – that fascinated us: it seemed a portal to the past, so mysterious that it made the very idea of a phantom hunt seem plausible. Covered in an emerald sheen of evergreen flora, vast swathes of temperate rainforest once grew all along the United Kingdom's western shores. Atlantic storms, heavy rainfall and high humidity levels provide a moisture-rich environment where this unique habitat can thrive, but centuries of deforestation mean that the Woodland Trust – the UK's largest woodland conservation charity – now describes this globally rare ecosystem as "more threatened than tropical rainforest". Lost” rainforest is a romantic idea but Britain’s Atlantic temperate rainforest is a formal, scientifically recognised habitat – and globally scarcer than tropical rainforest. According to ecologists, “rainforest” is land receiving more than 1,400mm of rain each year with rain spread across the summer as well as winter. Temperate rainforest is cool but not cold, with July temperatures averaging 16C or less. “It’s the definition of a British summer holiday really,” says Shrubsole wryly.

Mapping what survives is only the first part of this project. The next phase is to attempt to restore our lost rainforests to something approaching their former glory. That process is already under way in Scotland and Wales, where charities and alliances have formed to protect and rejuvenate their diminished rainforest habitats. (England, as ever, seems to be lagging behind.) The rainforest was once a well-used resource, providing timber, charcoal and tannin for tanning leather. But our rainforest is threatened. It has suffered long term declines through clearances, chronic overgrazing, and conversion to other uses. This has left a small and fragmented resource. The donation builds on Aviva Ireland’s recent €5m donation to the Nature Trust, to help accelerate its native tree afforestation project. It also supports Aviva’s ambition to make the UK the most climate-ready economy following the recent launch of Aviva’s climate-ready campaign.

When Shrubsole established a blog, asking people to help record overlooked fragments of rainforest – often only existing as treeless “shadow woods” in the phrase of the ecologist Ian Rotherham – he was amazed by the response. A Guardian story about his rainforest fascination received more than 200,000 views, and yet more information from the public, and his book was born. The carbon removal should deliver significant biodiversity and climate change adaptation benefits by creating habitat that can support flora including mosses, lichen, ferns and a host of unusual plants and wildlife such as wood warblers, bats, pine martens and red squirrels. The increase in woodland should also help to moderate water flows and improve shading in the hotter, drier conditions expected with climate change. Caroline Lucas is introducing a private member’s bill on the issue and Shrubsole hopes to persuade all political parties to commit to it in their manifestos. Would a future Labour government widen access to the countryside? “I’m cautiously optimistic that Labour sees access to nature as being part of its legacy and its future. Labour brought in the National Parks Act and the original right to roam in 2000. A number of senior Labour people now see that as unfinished business. I would love Labour to say a lot more about the nature crisis and find its voice on that again because it clearly needs to.” Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. I didn’t really believe it until I moved to Devon last year and started visiting some of these incredible habitats. Temperate rainforests are exuberant with life. One of their defining characteristics is the presence of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, often in such damp and rainy places. In woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I’ve spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns.

If you were asked where the world's most endangered rainforest is, then it's unlikely your first answer would be the British Isles. But the United Kingdom is home to dwindling patches of temperate rainforest, a rare and ancient ecosystem that is found in isolated fragments along the country's western coastlines. The Lost Rainforests of Britain campaign today launches a new map revealing the extent of Britain’s surviving fragments of temperate rainforest. The pastoral idyll that we project – the idea of England as a ‘green and pleasant land’, a wonderful union of people and nature – certainly hasn’t been true in the last century and probably longer. So we need to find a new way of relating to nature which is more in tune with it.” Shrubsole came to the Right to Roam campaign through his previous book, Who Owns England?, a dissection of the inequities of land ownership. “When I was writing Who Owns England? I constantly felt angry, but for this book I hope people feel a sense of infectious enthusiasm and optimism,” he says. “I genuinely feel that part of me has come alive again through exploring these places. They are just amazing and our route to some degree of redemption as well.” We are the UK’s leading Insurance, Wealth & Retirement business and we operate in the UK, Ireland and Canada. We also have international investments in India, China and Singapore.

As well as Shrubsole, the letter was signed by Ian Dunn, chief executive of Plantlife; Katie-Jo Luxton, global conservation director at the RSPB; Rosie Hails, the National Trust’s nature and science director; Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts; and Sir Tim Smit, co-founder of the Eden Project. In the letter, seen by the Guardian, leading wildlife NGOs urged the government to ensure all of England’s rainforests are put under protection to help support its commitment to protect 30% of the country, a key draft target for an international agreement on biodiversity that will be negotiated in December at Cop15 in Montreal.

Threats to temperate rainforest

FOR most of my life, I didn’t realise that Britain has rainforests. But then, two years ago, I moved to Devon. Exploring woods in forgotten valleys and steep-sided gorges, I found places exuberant with life. Extraordinarily, British rainforest was not mentioned in parliament until 2021 when – at Shrubsole’s behest – his local Conservative MP raised a question about its preservation in the House of Commons. He explained how much of this ancient woodland has succumbed to deforestation, competing demands for land, and, as recently as the 20th Century, government efforts to replace existing woodland areas with faster growing but non-native conifer trees. It's unclear exactly how extensive temperate rainforest coverage once was in the UK (Shrubsole said bluntly: "there was a lot more than there is now"), but the fragmented areas that do remain are isolated, often hard to reach and generally undocumented. For more details on what we do, our business and how we help our customers, visit www.aviva.com/about-us I didn’t know it at the time, but Wistman’s Wood has another secret: it is one of Britain’s few remaining fragments of temperate rainforest. The area’s warm, wet climate is the ideal host for woods kept evergreen by fountains of polypody ferns and layers of epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants). These richly biodiverse ecosystems once covered around a fifth of the nation, but an investigation by the influential campaigner Guy Shrubsole has revealed that today they account for just “half a per cent” of Britain.

Epiphytes are not parasitic. Because it’s wet enough, they simply use trees and branches as structures on which to grow. Britain’s temperate rainforests are incredibly rich in ferns, including polypody ferns which grow along the branches of trees. There are also many species of rare lichen, moss, and lungwort, and these epiphytes, in turn, support a massive amount of biodiversity when they grow on ancient oak and other woodland trees. How extensive were temperate rainforests in Britain’s past? Ceunant Llennyrch national nature reserve in Wales, where rare rainforest mosses grow. Photograph: Guy Shrubsole So the next time you go for a walk in the woods and spot ferns growing from branches, lichen sprouting like coral and tree trunks bubbling with moss, you may well be walking through one of this country’s forgotten rainforests. As the rain and mist obscured my view of the surrounding landscapes, it took little imagination to understand why the Woodland Trust describe Ausewell Woods as the "The Lost World". But until a concerted crowdfunding campaign raised the money to save Auswell Woods, this area of rainforest nearly became lost forever.I’m under no illusions that such an undertaking would be easy: in fact, it could be a lifetime’s work. It would require identifying not only the surviving fragments of rainforest, but also who owns them and the land surrounding them; persuading the various landowners, tenant farmers and commoners to cease overgrazing such land, setting it aside for the rainforest to naturally regenerate; and identifying sources of funding to either incentivise the farmers to do that, or buy the land outright.

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