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“Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It is about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats”.
Rewilding Europe
Although not a new concept, rewilding has gained much prominence in recent years, particularly as the scale of the biodiversity crisis has become apparent.
Rewilding is about:
– Nature’s own ways: Nature knows best when it comes to survival and self governance. We can give it a helping hand by creating the right conditions – by removing dikes and dams to free up rivers, by reducing active management of wildlife populations, by allowing natural forest regeneration, and by reintroducing species that have disappeared as a result of man’s actions. Then we should step back and let nature manage itself.
– Bringing back wildlife: European wildlife species have strongly declined, even in our wildest areas. Some of them have even gone extinct, while they play a critically important ecological role. Rewilding works to restore lost species guilds by giving them space to thrive, by population enhancement, and by reintroducing key native species.
– Ensuring wellbeing: When nature is healthy, we are healthier too. We rely on the natural world for water, food and air. There is a growing realization that connecting with wild nature makes us feel good and keeps us mentally and physically well. Rewilding is about reconnecting a modern society – both rural and urban – with wilder nature. We invite people to experience and live in these new, rewilded landscapes.
– Delivering for the future: There is no defined end point for rewilding. The aim is to support nature-driven processes, which in turn will bring about wilder nature. This takes time and space. Rewilding is about moving up a scale of wildness, where every step moving up this scale is seen as progress. If we create and protect areas where rewilding can take place, both people and wildlife will benefit in the long term.
Why is rewilding vital in Europe?
– Our ecosystems need to recover: We not only need to protect nature, but also need to restore it. Many ecosystems – the basis of our natural wealth – are broken. Rewilding offers a historical opportunity to recover them. Robust and connected ecosystems make us more resilient to impacts of climate change.
– We need keystone species: These vital species, including top predators and large herbivores, drive ecological processes. Wildlife is now making a comeback in Europe, but numbers are still low. Rewilding will accelerate their recovery and restore important food chains and trophic cascades.
– Wilder nature as an ally: Naturally functioning ecosystems are better at providing us with clean air and water, preventing flooding, storing carbon and helping us to adapt to climate change. Rewilding links ecology with modern economies, where wilder nature acts as an ally in solving modern socio-economic issues.
– Communities benefit: Rewilding boosts local economies where alternatives are scarce. We work towards situations where nature tourism flourishes and local people earn a fair living from nature-based enterprises. This will help revitalizing both rural and urban communities.
– Wild places inspire people: Experiencing the thrill of wild nature reconnects people with our living planet. This improves health and wellbeing and builds a shared sense of humanity and pride, both on the countryside and in cities.
– Nature’s ways are cost-effective: We believe that nature is fully capable of taking care of itself. This means letting natural processes shape our landscapes and ecosystems, instead of people actively managing that often requires high, recurrent costs. Self-regulating landscapes are more sustainable in the long run.
In summary, rewilding is an innovative and inspirational way of restoring Europe’s wild nature. By allowing natural processes to reshape and enhance ecosystems, rewilding can revitalize land and sea, helping to alleviate some of society’s most pressing challenges and creating spaces where nature and people can thrive in harmony. Rewilding is also about the way we think. It is about understanding that we are just one species among many, bound together in an intricate web of life that connects us with the atmosphere, the weather, the tides, the soil, fresh water, the oceans and every other living creature on the planet.
The Principles of Rewilding
Rewilding practitioners have co-formulated a set of principles that characterize and guide rewilding in a European context. All equally important: these are as follows:
– Providing hope and purpose: Rewilding generates visions of a better future for people and nature that inspire and empower. The rewilding narrative not only tells the story of a richer, more vital tomorrow, but also encourages practical action and collaboration today.
– Offering natural solutions: By providing and enhancing nature-based solutions, rewilding can help to mitigate environmental, social, economic and climatological challenges.
– Thinking creatively: Rewilding means acting in ways that are innovate, opportunistic and entrepreneurial, with the confidence to learn from failure.
– Complementary conservation: Rewilding complements more established methods of nature conservation. In addition to conserving the most intact remaining habitats and key biodiversity areas, we need to scale up the recovery of nature by restoring lost interactions and restore habitat connectivity.
– Letting nature lead: From the free movement of rivers to natural grazing, habitat succession and predation, rewilding lets restored natural processes shape our landscapes and seascapes in a dynamic way. There is no human-defined optimal point or end state. It goes where nature takes it. By helping nature’s inherent healing powers gaining strength, we will see people intervene less in nature going forwards.
– Working at nature’s scale: Rewilding means working at scale to rebuild wildlife diversity and abundance and giving natural processes the opportunity to enhance ecosystem resilience, with enough space to allow nature to drive the changes and shape the living systems.
– Acting in context: Rewilding embraces the role of people, and their cultural and economic connections to the land. It is about finding ways to work and live within healthy, natural vibrant ecosystems and reconnect with wild nature. We approach rewilding with a long-term knowledge of the environmental and cultural history of a place.
– Building nature-based economies: By enhancing wildlife and ecosystems, rewilding provides new economic opportunities through generating livelihoods and income linked to nature’s vitality.
– Long-term focus: To ensure sustained positive effects on biodiversity and resilient ecosystems for future generations, rewilding efforts aim and work on a long-term perspective.
– Knowledge exchange: Exchanging knowledge and expertise to continually refine rewilding best practice and achieve the best possible rewilding results. Using the best-available evidence, gathering and sharing data, and having the confidence to learn from failure will lead to success.
According to rewild.org, rewilding is “a positive reframing for nature conservation, involving holistic solutions to remove barriers and reestablish vibrant wildlife
populations and intact, functional, and resilient ecosystems that effectively integrate people”. It means the mass recovery of ecosystems and the life-supporting function they provide.
Rewilding occurs in 3 key ways:
– Habitat restoration: Returning degraded or fragmented habitats to their natural state by removing barriers, such as dams or fences, and letting the wild shape the landscape – Habitat restoration may also involve reestablishing natural water flows, reforestation, and restoring wetlands and grasslands.
– Species reintroduction: Restoring balance to the wild by returning native species to ecosystems where population have either disappeared or been severely reduced – Species reintroductions are often supported by conservation breeding programs.
– Ecological management: Active land management supports ecosystems in various stages of recovery and helps ensure the successful reintroduction of species. Human beings are part of the wild, and critical to its protection.
According to the Rewilding Institute, rewilding was originally envisioned as a continental scale effort in North America with protection of large wilderness cores, suitable habitat corridors for wildlife movement, and recovery of large carnivores. Over the ensuing three decades, the term “rewilding” has also been applied to national, regional, state, and local scale efforts and extended globally to South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
Rewilding is necessary wherever the balance of ecosystem function has been perturbed, where sufficient wild lands are not protected, connectivity has been compromised, or biodiversity has been diminished. Bird, butterfly, and other airborne species breeding places, wintering places, and their aerial migration pathways, and similar ecological components of marine species would also be appropriate for rewilding.
Rewilding at any scale first requires identifying wild — or nearly wild or potentially wild — core areas, determining what habitats are present, what species are present, and assessing the general health of the ecosystem. More difficult is to determine if there are pollutants or poisons present, or if any species have been extirpated, and whether any habitable wildlife corridors exist connecting with other cores. It also requires determining the history, ownership, and politics of the land.
Determining whether there are human developments on portions of the land that complicate the situation. In some instances, relatively simple actions such as enacting legal protection, stopping inappropriate hunting or fishing or harvesting, removing barriers such as fences or roads or dams, and allowing the area to rewild on its own through benign neglect are sufficient.
In other more complex instances, ecological engineering, physical (re)construction, planting of depleted or extirpated native plant species, and (re)introduction of depleted or extirpated native wildlife species–especially highly interactive species such as beaver or wolf–may be required. The larger the scale, the more complex the land ownership, and the greater the degree of human development, the more difficult the rewilding.
Why is Rewilding important?
– Science (conservation biology) data argues that the structure, diversity, and resilience of ecosystems is often maintained by “top-down” ecologic (trophic) interactions that are initiated by top predators.
– The same science data argues that bigness is justified, as wide-ranging predators usually require large cores of protected wild landscape habitat for foraging, seasonal movements, and other needs.
– Science data further argues that connectivity between cores is also required, as remaining core reserves in most regions are typically not large enough.
– The moral argument that humans have a responsibility to other species to restore self-regulating and self-sustaining ecological communities.
– Science (ecopsychology) argues that “people need nature” for the mental and physical well-being gained by experiencing nature, particularly the subjective and emotional essence of “the wild” or wilderness.
Who is (or should be) involved in rewilding?
Everyone has a vested interest in rewilding; therefore, every individual should at least be aware of and somewhat knowledgeable about rewilding. Ecologically-minded individual conservationists such as Dave Foreman and John Davis, conservation biologists such as Michael Soule and Reed Noss, and many other individuals did most of the original work on rewilding. In the United States and Canada, organizations like The Rewilding Institute and The Wildlands Network (formerly The Wildlands Project), the Yellowstone to Yukon group, the Sky Island Alliance, and the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council have also contributed greatly to rewilding efforts. Unfortunately, neither the U.S. nor Canadian nor Mexican governments have contributed significant effort or funds, and government personnel often are unaware of rewilding needs and possibilities.
The Benefits and Risks of Rewilding
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), rewilding aims to restore ecosystems and reverse biodiversity declines by allowing wildlife and natural
processes to reclaim areas no longer under human management. Misunderstanding of the rewilding concept has led to applications that harm communities and biodiversity and threaten to undermine an approach with enormous conservation potential. Well-applied rewilding can restore ecosystems at a landscape scale, help mitigate climate change and provide socio-economic opportunities for communities. Evidence-based rewilding principles will guide practitioners to rewild safely, help assess the effectiveness of projects and incorporate rewilding into global conservation targets.
Rewilding aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces. It rebuilds ecosystems that have previously been modified by human disturbance, using the plant and animal life that would have been present had the disturbance never occurred. In doing so rewilding restores the natural processes that provide humanity with clean air, water, food, shelter and medicine. This idea of reversing biodiversity loss and creating wild landscapes by allowing nature to reclaim areas no longer under human management has gained much attention as an optimistic approach to conservation.
Well-intentioned governments, NGOs, communities and individuals are more frequently adopting ‘rewilding’ strategies, but the principles are inconsistently defined, and often misrepresented and misapplied. Misuse of the increasingly popular rewilding concept risks alienating communities, harming existing biodiversity and undermining confidence in a technique with enormous conservation potential. Rewilding principles agreed between over 150 rewilding experts guide practitioners to rewild safely and suggest mechanisms for policymakers and funding agencies to assess the effectiveness of projects and so prioritize support.
Poorly managed rewilding carries risks for biodiversity and local people. A 2019 study evaluates the Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) project in the Netherlands which began in 1983 with the introduction of Heck cattle, Konik horses and red deer to reclaimed land. Their numbers were not managed, and the animals could not move to new habitats, so populations were largely regulated by food availability. Native vegetation was degraded by overgrazing, and up to 30% of the animals died over winter periods when food was scarce. In 2018 the management plan for OVP was revised, with reduced herbivore numbers.
Without proper consultation rewilding may not benefit local communities, especially those with histories of traditional land management such as hunting, farming, forestry and fisheries. Inappropriate plans to reinstate natural habitats and reintroduce animals that may have originally been extirpated because of conflicts with human interests are often controversial. Projects risk alienating local people unless stakeholders are involved in planning that identifies and mitigates such concerns. In several cases, a lack of consultation has led to local anti-rewilding campaigns causing projects to be abandoned.
A project in Chacabuco Valley in northern Chile is one example of successfully applied rewilding. Following a land purchase in 2004, Rewilding Patagonia removed livestock and farming infrastructure from 890 km2. Native vegetation and wildlife have since recreated
Patagonian steppe and temperate beech forest systems which function without human intervention. The project also supports ranchers around the rewilded landscapes to implement sustainable land management practices.
What can be done?
IUCN welcomes efforts by governments, conservation agencies and other partners to rewild in certain parts of the world. It stresses the need to consider ecological, economic and societal issues in the development of rewilding initiatives and to engage all relevant stakeholders from the onset. In consultation with over 150 rewilding experts, IUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM) Rewilding Thematic Group (RTG) has developed 10 principles to guide rewilding initiatives.
1. Rewilding uses wildlife to restore food webs and food chains.
2. Rewilding plans should identify core rewilded areas, ways to connect them, and ensure outcomes are to the mutual benefit of people and nature.
3. Rewilding requires local engagement and community support. 4. Rewilding focuses on the recovery of ecological processes, interactions and conditions based on similar healthy ecosystems.
5. Rewilding recognizes that ecosystems are dynamic and constantly changing. 6. Rewilding should anticipate the effects of climate change and act as a tool to mitigate its impacts.
7. Rewilding is informed by science and considers local knowledge. 8. Rewilding recognizes the intrinsic value of all species.
9. Rewilding is adaptive and dependent on monitoring and feedback. 10.Rewilding is a paradigm shift in the coexistence of humans and nature.
These ten principles provide a reference point for rewilding and support the incorporation of the technique into global conservation targets.
Sources:
Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth: https://wild11.org/charter/
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