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FOR most of my life, I didn鈥檛 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.

I witnessed branches dripping with mosses and trees festooned with lichens and liverworts. Even in winter, when deciduous trees lose their leaves, these woodlands were green with a verdant luminosity due to the plethora of species clinging to them. My adventures took me to places that felt like green cathedrals. Sunlight picked out the arches of tree trunks with their haloes of moss.

I was enraptured. Surely, I thought, such rich woodland belongs in the tropics, not the UK. But it is true. The British Isles harbour fragments of a globally rare 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 just 1 per cent of the world鈥檚 surface. They can鈥檛 match Amazonia for scale, but these habitats nonetheless teem with species and may be important carbon sinks.

Tragically, however, the British Isles have lost most of their rainforests to deforestation. In England, Scotland and Wales, the remaining fragments total at most 130,000 hectares. But there is hope for their future. With the right action, I believe the area they cover could double within a generation 鈥� and that by helping these rainforests flourish, the UK would send a powerful message on the importance of protecting rainforests the world over.

Temperate rainforests require a lot of rain to thrive: , according to a study published 30 years ago by Paul Alaback, then at the US Forest Service in Alaska. That rainfall needs to be spread across the year, in regions with year-round mild temperatures, to allow the rainforests to maintain their moisture content. These conditions are normally found in coastal areas, and temperate rainforest can be seen in the Pacific Northwest of North America and regions of Chile, Japan, Tasmania and New Zealand. Rainy weather is also common in Cornwall and Devon in the south of England, through Wales and England鈥檚 Lake District to Argyll and the western Highlands of Scotland in the north. In these regions, temperate rainforest can be found.

They are quite a sight. In the rainforests I have visited, there are oaks with limbs contorted into extraordinary shapes. Holly and birch thrive too, as do rowan, hazel and ash. The conditions also allow for the flourishing of epiphytes, which are plants that grow on other plants. They include foliose lichens, such as tree lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria) and various species of Sticta, some of which have . The epiphytes include some vascular plants: polypody fern and pennywort are good examples. There are also about 500 species of lichen in these temperate rainforests and more than 160 species of mosses and liverworts grow there, too. It is these often-ignored plants that give the rainforests their constant green aura.

Rainforest mapping

Epiphytes do more than give colour to the land, though. They may make temperate rainforests unusually potent carbon sinks. At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last year, a team led by Hannah Connuck at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania showed that the 鈥渟oils鈥� that epiphytes form in the canopy of tropical rainforests in Costa Rica . If the same holds true for the canopy soils in temperate rainforests, they may be an important part of our fight against climate change. However, investigations into this aspect of their ecology have yet to be started.

In 2016, ecologist Christopher Ellis at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK, calculated that across England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, the rainforest zone 鈥� the area with the right conditions to support rainforest growth 鈥� . Yet when I set out to map the surviving rainforest fragments of England, Wales and Scotland with Tim Richards at Terra Sulis Research in the UK, we found that they comprised .

My travels haven鈥檛 taken me to the rainforests of Northern Ireland, but research indicates . Clearly, the UK has lost much of its rainforest. Most of that loss took place long ago, as a result of land clearance for agriculture from the Bronze Age to medieval times. But some rainforests were cut down in the 20th century to make way for conifer plantations. Farm subsidies, many paid for by the taxpayer, have prevented the rainforests from regenerating.

Since the second world war, agricultural subsidies in the UK have been geared towards maximising the production of food to the detriment of nature. Then, after the UK joined the European Common Agricultural Policy in the 1970s, payments to livestock farmers were made per animal, which led to huge increases in the number of sheep and cattle in upland areas. Moves to cut back on these soaring livestock populations through environmental stewardship payments in recent decades haven鈥檛 yet undone the damage. There are more than , for example.

Such high grazing densities have stopped British rainforests from returning, even in areas where the climate is perfect for them to thrive. Sheep, in particular, nibble vegetation down to a tight sward and feed on the fresh shoots of young saplings. As a result, many of the surviving rainforests are dying out. They comprise collections of creaking veteran trees in which the process of natural regeneration has been thwarted by human mismanagement.

Even protected sites are threatened. The temperate rainforest of Johnny Wood in the Lake District, supposedly safe from harm following designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, was assessed last year as being in by Natural England, a non-departmental public body that advises the UK government. The problem? Overgrazing.

Rainforests that do remain healthy, meanwhile, often lie marooned in a desert of moorland, stranded far from their nearest neighbour. This lack of ecological connectivity makes it difficult for the rare species they support to spread, leaving them vulnerable to storms, heatwaves and climate change.

But there is hope for the rainforests. These extraordinary habitats can recover, and sometimes all that is required is for people to give them a break. As the late ecologist Oliver Rackham once remarked: 鈥淚n England, trees grow where people have not prevented them.鈥�

According to Natural England, Wistman鈥檚 Wood on Dartmoor 鈥� probably England鈥檚 most famous fragment of temperate rainforest 鈥� has . A little-known study published in 1980 by Molly and Malcolm Spooner and Michael Proctor shows why: there was a decline in grazing pressures in the wood鈥檚 locality. Likewise, at Lustleigh Cleave (a steep-sided patch of common land in Devon), a rainforest has returned by accident simply because fewer people who are entitled to graze livestock on the land have been exercising those rights.

Such examples, however, are few and far between; the result of chance circumstances. More concerted rainforest restoration efforts will require active intervention. An inspiring example of what can be achieved comes from New Zealand, where botanist Hugh Wilson has worked for 30 years to turn a 1250-hectare patch of former farmland now owned by the Maurice White Native Forest Trust into a temperate rainforest known as the . Removing grazing livestock and native to-tara podocarp trees, as well as animals including kereru- pigeons, jewelled geckos and 50-centimetre-long earthworms.

Wilson talked about his experiences in a 2019 viral documentary called . When he arrived, the local farmers 鈥渂asically thought we were naive greenies from the city鈥�, he said. Some 30 years on, he added: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think there鈥檚 a single farmer who鈥檚 not backing [us] now.鈥�

Back in the British Isles, decades of experiments with 鈥� where livestock animals are excluded from areas of overgrazed woodland, rather than penned in 鈥� have produced dramatic results: it isn鈥檛 just the trees that can rebound, but also a rich understorey of bilberries, heather and wildflowers. It may even be possible to achieve such results without fencing, using GPS-equipped livestock collars that administer a mild electric shock to animals when they wander towards a protected area.

Freed from such grazing pressures, temperate rainforests would begin to spread outwards. For a sense of how rapidly they might expand, consider Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire, England, an oak woodland that has been allowed to rewild for several decades 鈥� albeit in the drier east of the country where rainforests don鈥檛 grow. Last year, a team led by Richard Broughton at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology showed that jays, squirrels and other animals have carried acorns far from their mother trees and buried them in the neighbouring field, where they have flourished in the absence of nibbling sheep. As a consequence, the oak woodland has .

Using our maps of rainforest fragments across England, Wales and Scotland, Richards and I ran a model in which each of them was allowed to expand by this same distance. We concluded that the area of . It is astonishing to me that, using Monks Wood as a rough guide, we could potentially see such a dramatic expansion within a generation.

Crucially, this could be done with minimal impact on food production. For instance, the UK government-commissioned , published in 2021, calculated that England could spare 20 per cent of its least productive farmland for nature and only reduce food production in terms of calories by 3 per cent. Across the British Isles, most of the temperate rainforests are found on marginal land: steep-sided valleys and boulder-strewn hillsides, surrounded by bracken that is unpalatable to livestock. And with increasing numbers of people reducing their meat consumption, out of concerns for their health and environmental impacts, even more land could be freed up for nature.

Nor is this just a distant dream. Work is already underway by some pioneering landowners and farmers to restore rainforests in England and Scotland. Conservation charities like the Woodland Trust, National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are working to reconstruct temperate rainforests damaged by modern forestry plantations, from Ausewell Wood in Devon to Glencripesdale in Highland, Scotland. Estates like Cabilla in Cornwall are reconfiguring their business model around rainforest restoration, combining regenerative farming with income from eco-tourism.

But to see large-scale rainforest restoration, political intervention is needed. That is why, over the past 18 months, I have been leading a campaign called to lobby the UK government on rainforest protection and restoration. For instance, nearly three-quarters of England鈥檚 rainforests are unprotected: they desperately need help.

The recent political turmoil in the UK has generated uncertainty about the future of Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs). This is the UK government鈥檚 planned system of farm payments in England post-Brexit that was to have paid farmers and landowners to manage land in a way beneficial to the environment and wildlife. The UK government needs to get ELMs back on track, so that the temperate rainforests in England can get funding under ambitious Landscape Recovery projects.

Most importantly, all of the governments in the UK need to draw up rainforest strategies to tackle the many threats facing these special places, from overgrazing to invasive plants 鈥� particularly rhododendron, which spreads quickly and shades out other species with its evergreen leaves.

Projects to restore the lost rainforests across the UK could galvanise landowners and the wider public into repairing denuded landscapes and damaged carbon sinks. They could also add to growing global momentum to protect and restore all rainforests, both temperate and tropical. The victory of Luiz In谩cio Lula da Silva over Jair Bolsonaro in the recent Brazilian presidential elections has electrified environmentalists, giving fresh hope for the Amazon rainforest: under Lula鈥檚 last administration earlier this century, Amazonian deforestation fell by 80 per cent.

The governments in the UK ought to capitalise on this moment, not only by to help lower-income countries respond to the challenges of climate change, but also through a bold ambition to bring back the lost rainforests on their own shores.

Guy Shrubsole is an environmental聽campaigner and聽author. His latest book is The聽Lost Rainforests of Britain