What is Rewilding?
Definition of rewilding
Core definition
Rewilding is the process of restoring degraded ecosystems to a state of ecological autonomy — re-establishing the species, interactions, and natural processes needed for a landscape to regulate, sustain, and evolve itself with progressively less human management.
Extended definition
Rewilding spans a continuum of intervention, from passive rewilding, where human pressures are simply withdrawn and ecosystems recover unaided, to active rewilding, where reintroductions, structural removal, or process restoration are used to remove human-imposed barriers to recovery.
What unites these approaches is not the degree of intervention but the goal: restoring not just individual species but the coenosis — the web of predation, herbivory, competition, and other interactions — through which ecosystems regulate themselves.
Rewilding does not aim at a fixed, human-defined end state; it aims to return to ecosystems the conditions and relationships under which they can determine their own trajectory.
However: “Those who don’t know the past are bound to lose their way in the future.” Historical knowledge is fundamental to rewilding. Understanding how ecosystems functioned in the past helps us set realistic restoration goals, identify missing ecological processes and species, and make better-informed decisions for the future.
The Rewilding Academy holds an ecogenic view of this process: human intervention should play a supporting, time-limited role — addressing man-made problems such as invasive species, fragmentation, or missing keystone species — so that natural, self-organizing processes, not human-designed targets, ultimately drive the ecosystem’s recovery.
This distinguishes rewilding from both traditional habitat management, which sustains a fixed target state indefinitely, and novel (post-conservation) rewilding, which accepts open-ended, human-influenced trajectories, including non-native species, as a legitimate outcome in their own right.
Rewilding aims to restore three key ecological processes
Connectivity
Improved connection in landscapes supports wildlife movement and genetic exchange. It facilitates shifts in the ranges of plants and animals in response to climate change and other environmental threats.
Self-regulation
Ultimately, rewilding is a form of ecological restoration with an emphasis on humans stepping back and leaving an area to nature, as opposed to more active forms of natural resource management.
Restoring connectivity and successful reintroduction of keystone species create a self-regulatory and self-sustaining, resilient ecosystem, with improved biodiversity and climate change mitigation impact
According to the IUCN, rewilding is:
“The process of rebuilding, following major human disturbance, a natural ecosystem by restoring natural processes and the complete or near complete food-web at all trophic levels as a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem using biota that would have been present had the disturbance not occurred.”
Rewilding is dedomestication of nature
Ecosystem restoration involves a paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and nature. The ultimate goal of rewilding is: “the restoration of functioning native ecosystems complete with fully occupied trophic levels that are nature-led across a range of landscape scales“.
Rewilded ecosystems should be “self-sustaining requiring no or minimum-intervention management (i.e. natura naturans or “nature doing what nature does”), recognising that ecosystems are dynamic and not static“.
Rewilding can encompass a wide range of activities
- Natural Grazing and Predation Restoration – Reintroducing herbivores and apex predators to regulate ecosystems and maintain trophic balance.
- Habitat Connectivity Restoration – Creating wildlife corridors and green infrastructure to reconnect fragmented ecosystems, enabling species movement and genetic exchange.
- Waterway and Wetland Restoration – Re-meandering rivers, removing dams or barriers, restoring wetlands, and improving natural hydrology to support aquatic life and mitigate flooding.
- Passive Rewilding – Allowing land to recover naturally by reducing or ceasing human interventions such as logging, farming, or urban expansion.
- Traditional Ecological Knowledge Integration – Engaging Indigenous and local communities to incorporate traditional land stewardship and conservation practices.
- Climate Resilience Building – Enhancing carbon sequestration through afforestation, peatland restoration, and promoting climate-adaptive ecosystems.
- Agroforestry and Food Forests – Integrating trees, shrubs, and diverse plant species into agricultural systems to mimic natural ecosystems, enhance biodiversity, improve soil health, and create sustainable food production systems.
- Community Engagement and Ecotourism Development – Involving local communities in conservation efforts, promoting sustainable livelihoods, and fostering eco-friendly tourism.
Adapative management
Rewilding requires adaptive management, continuous learning and a dynamic approach that is updated regularly based on new insights. In heavily degraded land- and seascapes, humans may play a vital role in supporting nature’s recovery by removing barriers and kick-starting ecological processes.
megafauna Loss and ecosystem degradation
From the Late Pleistocene extinctions of terrestrial megafauna to the ongoing declines of terrestrial, marine, and freshwater large-bodied animals, vertebrates have been overexploited since the global expansion of modern humans (Homo sapiens). The largest land animals were extirpated first. It has become clear that the loss of wildlife worldwide, or defaunation, affects not only the iconic species but also the functions they have in ecosystems.
Recreating the past or shaping the future?
Neither. And both. Rewilding is a pathway, a process that is both past and future oriented.
The phrase “Rewilding is not about recreating the past” is often used by organisations and researchers who emphasise future-oriented, process-based rewilding. This approach argues that ecosystems are dynamic, that exact historical baselines are often impossible to reconstruct, and that restoration should focus on restoring ecological processes, trophic interactions, and resilience under current conditions.
However, this is not the only scientific perspective. Many ecologists, palaeoecologists, restoration practitioners, and conservationists argue that deep-time ecological history is essential. Understanding past ecosystems — including the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods (10,000–12,000+ years ago) — provides critical insights into:
- former species assemblages and functional diversity;
- natural disturbance regimes;
- predator–prey relationships;
- herbivore impacts on vegetation dynamics;
- lost ecological interactions;
- realistic targets for ecosystem restoration.
In other words, historical reference ecosystems are not necessarily a blueprint to copy exactly, but they are an important ecological compass. Ignoring them risks accepting degraded ecosystems as the new baseline (“shifting baseline syndrome”).
Rewilding is about restoring natural processes, about establishing healthy and functioning ecosystems, containing the full range of species at all trophic levels, and allowing species and ecosystems to evolve over time.
Rewilding also needs to consider future trends in climate and other human induced changes. In order to assure the effectiveness of rewilding approaches across time and under changing conditions, we must analyse future biodiversity scenarios that account for individualistic species responses, community re-composition, and functional variation in ecosystems.
To be successful, rewilding needs to be applied with a clear reference point and vision of the natural history of an area. Historical information spanning different temporal scales can provide ecological context for better understanding of present-day degraded ecosystems.
Unlike more traditional forms of conservation or nature restoration, rewilding does not have a clearly defined end point. It is not about restoring nature to a certain stage and then making sure that it stays that way.
Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth
The Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth calls on individuals, communities, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, governments, and other institutions to advance efforts to protect remaining large wild areas and to support rewilding projects around the world.
“A global rewilding movement—embraced by the broadest spectrum of constituencies and encouraged by governmental policy—can ultimately weave wondrous blue and green ribbons of wildness that wrap the Earth in beauty, offering the promise of a better future, with freedom and habitat for all.”
