Benefits of Rewilding
Rewilding benefits biodiversity
Not so long ago, our planet was blanketed in wild forests, free-flowing rivers, and vibrant wetlands that stretched, largely uninterrupted, across vast landscapes. Today, many of these regions are ecologically impoverished: wildlife populations have collapsed, habitats have fragmented into disconnected patches, and the web of relationships that once sustained them — predators keeping herbivores in check, herbivores shaping vegetation, scavengers cycling nutrients — has unraveled.
To move forward, we need to understand what has been lost, but more importantly, reimagine what could thrive again. Rewilding plays a central role in this: restoring degraded ecosystems and reconnecting fragmented habitats into a diverse, interconnected mosaic across which wildlife can move, disperse, and recolonise.
But rewilding’s contribution to biodiversity goes beyond simply reintroducing missing species. Its real power lies in restoring coenosis — the web of interactions between species that allows an ecosystem to regulate itself.
When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, their return didn’t just add one species back to the landscape; it curbed overgrazing by elk, allowed willows and aspens to recover, and cascaded down to benefit beavers, songbirds, and dozens of other species. Similar trophic cascades unfold wherever keystone species — apex predators, large herbivores, ecosystem engineers like beavers — are restored to their natural roles.
This is why rewilding tends to produce richer outcomes than efforts that protect species in isolation.
By rebuilding functional diversity — predation, herbivory, seed dispersal, nutrient cycling — and reconnecting habitats at a landscape scale, rewilding creates ecosystems that are not just more biodiverse, but more resilient: better able to withstand disturbances like drought and fire, and the accelerating pressures of climate change. The result is a more complex, self-sustaining web of life, and a meaningful step toward restoring ecological balance across landscapes globally.
Rewilding benefits our climate
The next decade is critical for addressing climate change, with its effects already being felt through rising temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events. A radical shift in our approach is essential to mitigate these changes.
Nature offers a powerful solution. Healthy ecosystems such as woodlands, peatlands, wetlands, and seagrass meadows act as natural carbon sinks, absorbing significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. When these habitats function properly, they not only capture carbon but also help buffer against the impacts of climate change by regulating floods, cooling the air, and protecting biodiversity worldwide.
Wildlife itself is part of this carbon-capture machinery. Animals shape the structure, density, and composition of the ecosystems around them in ways that can dramatically increase how much carbon those systems store — restoring wildlife populations is therefore not just a biodiversity goal, but a climate strategy in its own right.
African forest elephants are one of the clearest examples. As they move through the Congo Basin rainforest, elephants trample and browse on fast-growing, low-density saplings, thinning out competition and giving slower-growing, high-density trees more room to grow. Because dense wood stores more carbon per unit volume, this selective browsing measurably increases aboveground carbon stocks — a mechanism confirmed in Nature Geoscience, which found that elephant disturbance enhances carbon stocks in central African forests.
A 2023 study in PNAS went further, showing forest elephants boost carbon both through their browsing preferences and by dispersing the seeds of large, carbon-dense tree species, and that losing forest elephants from a forest could reduce its aboveground carbon stocks by 6 to 9 percent. Economists writing for the IMF have put a price on this service: if forest elephant populations, now at roughly 9 percent of their historic numbers, recovered across their former 2.2-million-square-kilometer range, the additional carbon captured could be worth more than $150 billion — over $1.75 million per elephant, dwarfing the roughly $40,000 an elephant’s ivory fetches on the black market.
Forest elephants aren’t the only species doing this work. Great whales fertilize ocean surface waters with iron- and nitrogen-rich waste as they feed and dive, boosting the phytoplankton that anchor marine carbon capture, and when they die, their carcasses sink to the seafloor, locking carbon away for centuries. On land, large grazing herds such as wildebeest in the Serengeti and bison on the North American plains cycle nutrients and maintain grassland structure in ways that help build carbon-rich soils, often storing carbon more securely below ground than forests store it above.
These examples point to a simple truth: restoring wildlife populations is one of the most cost-effective climate solutions available. Rewilding, by returning species like forest elephants, whales, and large grazers to their natural ecological roles, doesn’t just protect biodiversity — it actively rebuilds the planet’s capacity to draw down carbon, at a scale few engineered solutions can match.
Rewilding Enriches People’s Lives
As modern life pulls us further from nature, we’re spending less time outdoors, and it’s taking a toll on our well-being. Both our physical and mental health suffer when we disconnect from the natural world.
Nature-rich landscapes offer far more than scenic beauty; they provide the essential life-support systems we depend on. From clean air and water to fertile soils and a stable climate, thriving ecosystems are fundamental to human survival. Beyond these practical benefits, wild spaces inspire, heal, and reconnect us to the wonder of the natural world. A large UK study published in Scientific Reports found that people who spend at least 120 minutes a week in nature — whether in one outing or spread across several shorter visits — report significantly better physical and mental health than those who spend no time outdoors at all; even short exposure to green space has been shown to lower stress hormones like cortisol and ease anxiety and depression.
Rewilding restores this connection at its source. By bringing back wildlife and wild places, it gives people somewhere to walk, breathe and reconnect — not a landscape to view from a distance, but one they can be part of.
The benefits extend well beyond well-being. Thriving wild landscapes create livelihoods. Across Africa, wildlife tourism generates an estimated $29 billion a year and supports 3.6 million jobs, from safari guides and rangers to the hospitality workers in communities bordering protected areas; in Tanzania alone, the safari industry accounts for more than 345,000 jobs. Rewilding projects elsewhere tell a similar story: an analysis of 33 rewilding sites in England found full-time-equivalent jobs grew 54 percent over ten years as land shifted toward nature-based tourism, food production and ecological work, and rewilding initiatives in Italy’s Apennines have generated hundreds of thousands of euros for local guides, food producers and accommodation providers within just a few years.
Rewilding, then, is not a retreat from human life but an investment in it. It will not only bring back lost wildlife — it will restore our connection to the landscapes that sustain us, and build more resilient, prosperous communities in the process.
