Rewilding is the most exciting and promising conservation strategy to slow down or halt the 6th mass extinction of species. It also has tremendous potential for climate change mitigation and has had documented successes in restoring biodiversity and ecosystem processes. It however needs to be applied with a clear vision of the history of an area and what can be restored.

Rewilding

Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration, an active form of conservation that has significant potential to increase biodiversity and create self-sustainable landscapes, while also mitigating climate change and contributing to rural economies.

Rewilding aims to do this by reintroducing lost animal species to natural environments. It is an exciting and promising conservation strategy aimed at restoring natural processes and wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas (corridors), and reintroducing large herbivores, predators and/or keystone species.

While reintroduction is an approach that many conservationists take to restore and reinforce endangered species populations, rewilding’s focus on animals high up on the food chain like apex predators and large herbivores make it unique. The reason these particular species are targeted by rewilding is that by being high up on the food chain, they influence many species below them by restoring ecological functioning.

Since it was first academically defined in 1998 by American conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, as an approach focusing on “cores, corridors, and carnivores”, the idea of rewilding has evolved in several different directions. The main offshoots of the original idea including Pleistocene rewilding (Donlan et al, 2005), passive wilding (Gillson et al., 2011), and translocation rewilding (Seddon et al., 2014). These variations on rewilding each come with their own set of potential benefits and challenges.

Most rewilding approaches fit the concept of trophic rewilding, defined as: “an ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems”.

Principles for Rewilding

From the Rewilding Charter

The ecosphere is based on relationships
Rewilding our hearts and minds is fundamental. Thus, a crucial first step toward widespread societal embrace of rewilding is to accept, celebrate, and activate the principle of “relationship,” the essential function and ethic that sustains life on Earth.

Making hopeful stories come to life
Rewilding is about telling the story of a richer, more vital future but also about executing successful projects—empowering others to support and join this movement by demonstrating positive results.

Embracing natural solutions and thinking creatively
Rewilding can help solve environmental, social, and economic problems. Conservationists should design and implement rewilding projects in ways that are ambitious, innovative, proactive, strategic, opportunistic, and entrepreneurial.

Protecting the best, rewilding the rest
Conserving the most intact remaining habitats and key biodiversity areas35 as well as working to recover lost interactions of nature at all levels and restore habitat connectivity in land- and seascapes at every scale, shows the complementarity of rewilding and traditional approaches to nature protection.

Letting nature lead
As in medicine, rewilding efforts should emphasize helping nature’s inherent healing powers gain strength, with the goal that management interventions would decline or cease over time. Humility will allow us to cede control, enabling restored natural processes to shape dynamic land- and seascapes of the future.

Working at nature’s scale
Natural systems operate at many scales continuously. Similarly, global rewilding efforts can work place by place, incrementally and at various scales to rebuild wildlife diversity and abundance and allow natural processes, such as disturbance and dispersal, to create resilience in natural and social systems.

Taking the long view
To ensure sustained positive effects on biodiversity and quality of ecosystem services (such as carbon storage), rewilding efforts must be planned and implemented with a long-term perspective.

Building local economies
Creating, expanding, and restoring natural areas with abundant wildlife can provide new opportunities to create economic vitality and generate livelihoods linked to nature’s vitality.

Recalling ecological history and acting in context
Successful rewilding efforts are informed by deep knowledge of the environmental and cultural history of particular places. Working within the social, biological, and physical realities of a territory will foster successful rewilding outcomes.

Evidence-based adaptive management
Learning from others, using the best-available evidence, gathering and sharing data, and having the confidence to learn from failure will lead to success and grow the institutional capacity of the rewilding community.

Public/private collaboration
In the way that public/private collaboration has helped to expand protected areas, private initiative can catalyze public actions from governments at every scale, from local to national, so that economic and institutional frameworks provide increasing incentives for rewilding.

Working together for the good of ourselves and nature
Effective advocates for nature build coalitions and forge partnerships based on respect, trust, and common interest. Connecting different disciplines, working intergenerationally and honoring the perspectives of diverse stakeholders will produce successful rewilding results.