What is rewilding and does it work?

Rewilding is an approach to conservation that aims to restore natural processes and allow ecosystems to organise themselves, rather than managing habitats toward a fixed target state.

How it differs from traditional conservation. Conventional habitat management often maintains a landscape at a chosen point — mowing a meadow, coppicing a wood, controlling scrub — to preserve particular species. Rewilding instead restores the drivers: grazing, predation, natural water movement, disturbance, decay — and accepts that the resulting ecosystem is not predetermined.

Core components:

Restoring natural disturbance and grazing, often using proxies for extinct species — hardy cattle and ponies standing in for aurochs and tarpan, pigs for wild boar.

Reintroducing keystone species, particularly predators and ecosystem engineers.

Reconnecting fragmented habitat, since isolated reserves lose species over time.

Reducing intervention, including allowing deadwood, scrub and messiness that traditional management removes.

Evidence that it works:

Yellowstone wolves are the famous case, associated with reduced elk browsing pressure, vegetation recovery and river changes. Note that the popular version substantially overstates it — subsequent research indicates the effects were real but smaller and more complex than the widely shared accounts suggest, with other factors contributing.

Beavers have stronger and clearer evidence. Reintroductions in Britain and Europe have produced measurable reductions in downstream flood peaks, improved water quality through sediment trapping, and large increases in wetland biodiversity.

Knepp Estate in Sussex is the best-documented British example, showing rapid increases in birds, invertebrates and rare species on former intensive farmland.

The genuine objections:

Land use conflict, particularly with farming and food production.

Predator reintroduction raises real livestock concerns requiring compensation schemes.

Unpredictability is intrinsic — you cannot guarantee outcomes for a named species.

"Wild" is contested in landscapes shaped by people for millennia.

Local consent matters, and top-down schemes have failed on it.