wildE: climate-smart rewilding
An innovative approach to ecological restoration that benefits the climate and biodiversity while addressing the needs of local communities.
Human interference in natural ecosystems has caused wide-spread ecological destruction. To combat climate change and biodiversity loss, we need to restore significant areas of the ecosystems that we have destroyed.
To do so, we must step back and let nature take control.
Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration centred around processes that help ecosystems to regulate themselves, whilst reducing human control and pressures. By rewilding, we can create the right conditions to allow nature to manage itself.
Rewilding has the potential to help us achieve our restoration goals and to mitigate the impacts of the environmental crises, but only if it is carried out on a much larger scale.
By developing climate-smart rewilding, our vision is for a future where rewilded landscapes are valued and can support us in achieving our climate, land-use, economic and societal goals.
By bringing together experts from the environmental sciences, social sciences and economics, the wildE project is developing climate-smart rewilding, a holistic approach to rewilding that considers climatic, economic and societal challenges in order for ecological restoration to become a financially viable nature-based solution which benefits both public and private stakeholders.
Funded by Horizon Europe, the wildE project uses detailed surveys and models to evaluate the potential impact of rewilding on carbon and biodiversity, today and in a warmer future.
What we do
We are carrying out in-depth research at eight case study sites across Europe, to gather first-hand information on rewilding across a mixture of urban, peri-urban and rural landscapes.
Where we work
