We don’t all relate to or value nature in the same way. Opinions can differ on why nature is important or valuable to us.

In this Green Shoots webinar, PhD candidate Angus Monro Smith from Wageningen University will present work on developing a psychometric scale which is intended to help operationalise the Nature Futures Framework in quantitative survey research.

Through this framework, developed with colleagues from Copenhagen University and the Germany Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), we will be able to understand different perspectives on nature, including:

• Does it simply have its own intrinsic value? 

• Is it valuable for the services and goods it provides human beings? 

• Is it valuable because it helps us to understand our place in the world, or shapes our way of life? 

• Is it a mixture of the three? 

It is expected that different perspectives on why nature is valuable, and what features of nature are a priority for the future will help to explain different attitudes towards rewilding, and potential preferences for different approaches to rewilding.

Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kby22iyvQBywokpw1YWz1g

How does rewilding affect the value of natural areas in economic terms?

How does rewilding affect recreation and the value people get from being in nature?

In this Green Shoots webinar, Tim de Kruiff and Jette Bredahl Jacobsen discussed the impacts rewilding can have on recreation and nature value.

Using their own work from Denmark and presenting insights from the field of environmental valuation in general, Tim and Jette took us on an economic journey through rewilding. In their work, they look at the potential impacts of rewilding and nature management on the recreational and broader societal value of natural areas.

The wildE consortium brings together researchers from many different academic fields. In the next few webinars, we’ll be departing from the field of ecology and moving towards economics and social sciences. Where does rewilding fit into these fields? What sorts of issues do they deal with?

The webinar is now available to watch on YouTube.

About the speakers

• Tim de Kruiff is a PhD-student at the department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. His research primarily focuses on the valuation of rewilding benefits. He looks at the impact of different possible choices in management of natural areas, and how this affects people’s willingness to pay for nature. Working closely together with the ecologists, ethicists and sociologists in the consortium, his research aims to build an understanding of people’s preferences and trade-offs in relation to rewilding.

• Jette Bredahl Jacobsen is a professor in environmental and resource economics at the department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. She teaches and does research on a broad range of topics within this field, in particular environmental valuation, forest economics, climate economics. In particular, she looks at the valuation of non-use values (e.g. biodiversity) and decision making where risk and uncertainty plays a central role. She is the current vice chair for the European Advisory Board for Climate Change and a special advisor in the Danish Environmental Economic Council.

Currently, most European forest landscapes are intensively managed, leading to the disappearance of the most pristine wilderness, such as primary and natural forests, with strong negative impacts on biodiversity. Although natural disturbances play a critical role in maintaining multiple taxonomic groups and species across large landscapes, the low acceptance of these disturbances as part of natural dynamics and rewilding tools is a key driver of the legal loss of primary forests and wilderness in Eastern Europe. 

Despite the relatively small total area of these valuable ecosystems, they are directly endangered - especially by salvage logging. Road construction has increased accessibility to mountain wilderness areas that were largely protected for centuries due to their inaccessibility.

At wildE’s Green shoots webinar on 9 January 2024, we heard from Martin Mikoláš and Rhiannon Gloor, from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. They discussed safeguarding the pristine wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains in the context of new research on the ineffectiveness of protected area management in Europe. This example and new extensive study underscores the importance of conservation strategies to halt the rapid disappearance of the last of temperate Europe’s primary forests and their unique biodiversity.

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Watch the recording below

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Despite representing a very small fraction of the living biomass on Planet Earth, large wildlife species have an incredible impact on ecosystems. We are living in an increasingly defaunated planet, where large wildlife species are vanishing from our world, and subsequently the critical role they play in the regulation of ecosystems and the services these provide to sustain human societies.

In this talk, post-doctoral researcher Nacho Villar from the NIOO-KNAW Netherlands Institute for Ecology presented alongside professor in Rewilding Ecology Liesbeth Bakker.

Having gained new insights from studying wildlife and ecosystem interactions in the tropical forests of Brazil, Nacho is now back in Europe producing new, cutting-edge research on rewilding. Liesbeth is Europe’s first professor of rewilding and studies rewilding as a novel ecosystem restoration technique at the NIOO-KNAW Netherlands Institute for Ecology.

Nacho and Liesbeth discussed how large wildlife can help us to fight against climate change in different regions of the world, from tropical forests to tundra ecosystems, discussing the current state-of-the-art about some ecological processes through which large wildlife can contribute towards climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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Watch the recording below

Download the presentation slides