Nature Restoration at the Landscape Scale

Large-scale nature restoration, including rewilding, is an essential part of the solution to the climate and biodiversity crisis. Only healthy functioning ecosystems can support our societies now and in the future. This does not mean abandoning land and water management, some of which is vital to ecosystem regeneration, but it means a very different approach to using the land and sea.

Rather than returning to the past, we recognise that our environment has fundamentally changed and will continue to change in response to climate change and other key drivers. Under a new paradigm, besides protecting land and sea, we need to work with natural processes, based on circular and regenerative processes, so that we can sequester carbon, adapt to weather extremes and diseases, and bring back our wildlife.

People and livelihoods are essential to the successful restoration of nature at a large scale. Large-scale nature restoration or rewilding connect people with nature and provide a context where human activities can be undertaken in harmony with nature. Through the restoration and regeneration of our uplands, woodlands, rivers and floodplains, coasts and seas, and of our soils, we can bring resilience to the economy, we can maintain food production and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

We envision large-scale nature restoration and rewilding as solutions for our times and look to the future in designing and implementing them.