By Gesche Schifferdecker and Margarita Penna
Across Europe, landscapes are quietly changing. Mountain farms and pastures are being abandoned, forest management is easing in some regions, and climate and policy pressures are reshaping how land is used. For some, these trends raise concerns. For others, they open a powerful question: where could nature return, at scale, if we let it?
This is the starting point of WILDCARD’s “First iteration estimates of rewilding area and potential” (Deliverable 1.1), the project’s first EU-wide attempt to map where rewilding could realistically take place over the coming decades.
Rather than asking where rewilding should happen, this work asks a more grounded question: where is rewilding most likely to happen, given social, economic, and environmental change? The answer provides a much-needed baseline for understanding Europe’s rewilding potential – and for shaping future policy and restoration strategies.
Seeing opportunity in land-use change
Rewilding in WILDCARD is not a single process. It emerges through different pathways: when agricultural land is abandoned and forests naturally grow back; when managed forests are allowed to mature and develop more natural structures (proforestation); or a large step towards rewilding can be taken by going from intensive agricultural use to new mixed-use forests where ecological needs are explicitly addressed.
To capture this complexity, researchers explored eight future scenarios that reflect different development pathways for Europe. These scenarios cover both the IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and the IPBES Nature Futures Framework, ranging from business-as-usual futures to more ambitious, policy-driven nature restoration pathways. More particularly, the IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathwaysdescribe different ways society, economies, and governance might develop in the future, from current trends to transformative change. The IPBES Nature Futures Framework adds perspectives on how humans value and interact with nature. Together, they offer a comprehensive picture of how Europe’s landscape could evolve, visually showing how different socio-economic choices and visions of nature we prioritise can shape future land-use patterns.
At the heart of the analysis lies the CLUMondo model, a spatially explicit land-use model that simulates how land systems evolve under changing demands, policies, and biophysical conditions. The model projects land-use changes across Europe from 2020 to 2050, at a fine resolution of 1 km², allowing researchers to zoom from continental patterns down to regional detail.
Mapping Europe’s rewilding hotspots
Despite the diversity of futures explored, a striking pattern emerges from the WILDCARD work: forest recovery is an important feature in almost all scenarios.
The strongest signals appear along Europe’s major mountain systems – the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and the Dinaric–Šar–Pindus arc – where steep terrain, lower agricultural profitability, and existing forest cover create favourable conditions for natural regeneration. These landscapes form the backbone of Europe’s potential rewilding corridors.
Different processes dominate in different regions
- Proforestation is most common in areas with relatively large and not very intensively managed forests, where reduced intervention allows forests to develop toward near-natural conditions.
- Agricultural abandonment and rewilding are most likely in marginal farmland, particularly in Southern and Central Europe, where retreating agriculture opens space for forest regrowth.
- Combined-objective forests emerge on previously cultivated lands mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, where land is released from agriculture but remains partially managed for multiple benefits. While not rewilding per se these transitions make an important contribution to a wilder Europe.
When these processes are combined, they reveal a coherent continental picture: rewilding potential clusters in uplands and less productive landscapes, while Europe’s intensively farmed lowlands largely remain under production.Why policy matters
One of the most important insights comes from the “SSP2 – Planned Rewilding scenario” developed by WILDCARD researchers. Here, rewilding is not left entirely to chance. Spatially guided towards areas of potentially high ecological importance and good chances on rewilding success, policy-supported measures produce more connected and coherent forest recovery patterns than spontaneous abandonment alone. In other words, how we guide rewilding matters as much as where it happens.
These first maps do not offer final answers – and they are not meant to. Instead, they provide a continental baseline: a shared reference point for exploring trade-offs, biodiversity outcomes, and climate benefits in the next phases of WILDCARD. As future deliverables refine these scenarios and link them to ecological and social outcomes, one message is already clear: Europe’s forests of the future are taking shape now – and understanding where nature can return is the first step toward letting it thrive.