What is Rewilding?
“Rewilding is about trusting the forces of nature to restore land and sea.”
Raquel Filgueiras – Head of Rewilding, Rewilding Europe
Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s 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 diverse habitats.
We not only need to protect nature, we 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.
It’s about creating the conditions where ecosystems can recover and are better able to deliver nature-based solutions to contemporary environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity decline.
"34% of the efforts needed to combat global warming could be achieved by ecosystem restoration," says www.ecosulis.co.uk .
Rewilding has only emerged as a new and exciting approach to conservation over the last 30 years, which means the practice is still developing.
You may like to visit the Knepp website to see a successful rewilding project in the UK. Knepp is a 3,500 acre estate just south of Horsham, West Sussex. Since 2001, the land, once intensively farmed, has been devoted to a pioneering rewilding project.
Using grazing animals as the drivers of habitat creation, and with the restoration of dynamic, natural water courses, the project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife. Very rare species like turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding here, and populations of more common species are rocketing.
Further reading:
The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery: Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe
Wilding - the story of the Knepp Estate project: Isabella Tree