Bothying and the Importance of Rainforest Restoration for UK Nature Markets

Between Christmas and New Year, a friend and I went bothying on the Morvern Peninsula and the Isle of Mull in Western Scotland.

Bothying involves walking up a glen to a remote dwelling - a bothy - maintained as a very basic shelter, carrying the essentials and hoping the place would be dry and that we’d brought enough fuelwood for a cheery fire.

The weather was abysmal, or to use the Scottish term, ‘dreich’ - gloomy, rainy, and cold weather created by the Gulf Stream. However, it helped me create an imagining of the #TemperateRainforest ecosystems that once covered these lands before they were settled some 8,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Squelching down a steep slope in the dark to get water from a lochan, I turned to retrace my steps. Soft raindrops blew into my face, and the light of my head torch illuminated dead grass drenched in water. The land was absolutely sodden; I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it.

As I negotiated the slippery, waterlogged hillside with my pot of water, it dawned on me that human-led transformation of temperate rainforests to rough grasslands and heather had produced a fundamentally different decomposition pathway. I was treading over sodden mats of cellulose, which only partly decompose due to the anaerobic conditions caused by waterlogging, leading to the creation of peat. In contrast, in the time of temperate rainforests, leaf litter would have covered the ground, and this would surely have followed a quite different decomposition pathway. At that point, I wasn’t sure exactly what pathway, and my mind and body were more focused on a quick and dry return to shelter!

As I brewed up, I reflected on how, as the ice caps retreated, the bare ground would have been bathed in this 'dreich' weather, creating growing conditions for trees. In the absence of large herbivores and human disturbance (which followed later), these trees would have developed into forest systems. They would have retained summer sunlight energy in their trunks and branches, and their leaf litter would surely have created something more like humus than peat.

Imagining Ancient Rainforests in Today’s Landscapes

The trek down from the Bothy passed a valley shaped like a shallow bowl with a river winding through a bog. I pictured how, as the ice sheets retreated and the climate warmed, willows and then alders would have colonised the riverbanks. Later, as beavers settled the area, their dams would have created pools and fens in this shallow valley. There would have been transitions to less water-tolerant trees such as oaks, hazel, rowan, and birch on the hillsides.

But it was the temperate forest ecosystem rather than its habitats that I was trying to imagine. Nearing the estate offices at the foot of the glen, oaks lined the river, and a few silver birches grew along a steep tributary. The outer branches of some of the oaks were so covered in lichens that they almost appeared in leaf, and the trunks of the birches were adorned with other lichen species. A steep wooded embankment had a thick carpet of moss covering tree roots and boulders. These observations prompted me to imagine winter woodlands not as dark woody skeletons but as a kaleidoscope of glaucous, orange, and red coloured lichens interspersed with green moss and ferns overlying a framework of brown, grey, and silver bark.

The microstructural diversity of these lichen, moss, and fern communities must have been immense, along with their water-absorbing capacity. But as I peered through my rain-spattered glasses at a lichen-covered branch, I wondered: are these plants as dormant as the trees? Back in the car, I consulted ChatGPT on this and the leaf litter decomposition pathway point. It responded that lichens can photosynthesise in low sunlight conditions and, in waterlogged conditions, leaf litter decomposition is dominated by fungi that specialise in breaking down lignin and tannins. This process slowly creates humus and releases nutrients back into the system.

At this point, I began to see what we have lost: a scaffolding of trees rooted in deep humus with complex fungal networks spreading across the forest floor and upwards into the canopy, covered in lichens, ferns, and mosses. This created massive structural diversity and surfaces for sunlight capture, enabling nutrients to flow into primary consumers—arthropods, insects, spiders, and so forth. This system chugged along during the cold, dark winter months and retained the energy and life to ‘spring’ into action as days lengthened and sunlight energy increased, creating a superabundance of food for summer migrants.

Reimagining Carbon Markets: Rainforest Restoration and Ecosystem Credits

Our walk to the second bothy took us up a glen populated by two herds of Highland cattle, sheep, and commercial conifer plantations. During the walk there and (partially) back, I saw seven species of birds totalling 19 individuals (eight of which were greylag geese). The ecosystem seemed to be barely functioning.

The weather the following morning was ‘dreich max,’ but fortunately, a kindly farmer offered us a lift just as we were bracing ourselves for another wave of rain. I asked him about the newly planted lines of trees on the opposite hillside. He said they were #CarbonForestry plantations involving a mix of soft and hardwoods. Looking at their regimented lines extending across and down the hillside without any consideration for the natural topography, I thought: what an opportunity we are missing. Developing and adopting planting designs informed by an understanding of temperate rainforest systems could produce so much more than carbon credits. We could be the generation that restores temperate rainforests at scale.

For sure, rainforest ecosystem planting designs would generate a lower forecasted number of #CarbonCredits per hectare based on current silviculture-based metrics that only account for carbon sequestered in the wood of trees—the trunk, and increasingly roots and branches. This incentivises intensive tree planting to maximise returns on investment in carbon forestry.

Temperate rainforest restoration, if designed to accelerate canopy spread and litter fall, would supplement ‘woody’ carbon with the carbon stored in a growing layer of humus along with the abundant rainforest biota. At present, we are just beginning to comprehend this, never mind measure it. However, if investors believe that markets for carbon credits will still exist in 30-40 years, investing in temperate rainforest planting designs could pay dividends in the long term as the science of measurement will surely catch up. Lastly, recovering rainforest systems would produce a holistic package of #EcosystemServices.

The reality of our “dreich climate” (especially in the west) and seasonal changes in day length means that decomposition pathways really matter when designing effective carbon and nature markets and policies. UK #CarbonMarkets are currently structured by the Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Carbon Code. The former doesn’t account for this, and the latter embodies the human-induced cellulose decomposition pathway.

My bothying trip reinforced my view that introducing ecosystem recovery credits makes sense for #NatureFinance, investors and public policy. It was great to see the #ScotGov annoucned their intention to do just this in the thier Natural Capital Market Framework published in Noc 2024. Lets hope others will follow their lead in 2025.

#EcosystemRestoration #SustainableForestry #ClimateAction #Biodiversity #Rewilding?#RegenerativeEconomy #UKForestry