Climate change making rainforest restoration ‘more complicated’, expert warns

Climate change is making restoring Scotland’s rainforest “more complicated” with access to funding “holding us back”, members of a coalition to save it have said.

The Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforests has recognised that climate change is predicted to shrink Scotland’s rainforest, while air pollution could impact the rare lichens and bryophytes that are highly sensitive to environmental conditions.

There are about 93,000 hectares of semi-natural woodland in Scotland’s rainforest zone, but less than one third contains rainforest biodiversity.

Scotland has the best remaining rainforest sites in all of Europe, however only around 30,000 hectares are left – an area slightly bigger than Edinburgh.

The alliance is a network of more than 40 organisations working together to restore and protect Scotland’s rainforests, including the National Trust for Scotland, RSPB Scotland, Plantlife Scotland and Forestry and Land Scotland.

Christopher Ellis, conservation science lead at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, which is also part of the alliance, told the Press Association: “One of the projections for future climate change in the UK is, for example, that our summers will get warmer and they’ll get drier.

“Something like that represents a threat to the existence of the rainforest and the species that occupy the rainforest, because they’re unlikely to cope with these periods of drought, these warmer and drier conditions that we’re likely to experience during our future summers.”

Scotland’s rainforest exists in the semi-natural woodlands of Scotland’s west coast due to the area’s high rainfall, mild temperatures and clean air.

These conditions provide the right conditions for mosses, liverworts and lichens to thrive.

Moss covered trees at Barnluasgan, Argyll.(Lorne Gill/NatureScot/2020VISION for

The alliance hopes to expand the rainforest and is aiming for all possible rainforest biodiversity areas to be restored by 2045.

However, Dr Ellis said climate change makes forward planning for the rainforest “more complicated”.

He continued: “If you’re regenerating temperate rainforest, it becomes necessary to think about where in the landscape you are most likely to get those climate change refugia.

“Thinking about climates in 50 years’ time or 100 years’ time, that sort of forward planning around climate change… it makes everyone’s lives much more complicated, but it’s something that occupies a lot of my research time.”

If the alliance manages to restore the rainforest and double its size, experts say it would become a more resilient ecosystem to any impacts of climate change.

Julie Stoneman, Saving Scotland’s Rainforest programme manager at Plantlife Scotland, said the goal is “a very ambitious project”, but it is not out of reach.

She said: “That is beyond my wildest dreams. I never thought we’d get to that. I always thought it was a bit of an aspiration, the 2045. But if we carry on with this level of interest and momentum, we would get there.”

The alliance has estimated the amount of investment needed to restore Scotland’s rainforest is around £500 million.

Ms Stoneman said: “The thing that’s holding us back is long-term funding. There is funding about, and it has been increasing and all these projects are moving through the development phase into delivery phase… but you can only do phases of them within that because there’s not enough money to go round, and you know everything’s at a pinch.

“We somehow need to find a way to give them more guarantees so they can think longer term about funding rather than these little bits of funding that’s available here and there for them to use, which they are using as well as they can at the moment.”