World Rewilding Day, celebrated every 20 March, aims to raise awareness of the benefits of wilder nature for wildlife, people and the planet. This year’s theme, Rewilding Together, demonstrates the importance of working together to create a world where all can thrive.
At the wildE project, we are collaborating with two other EU funded rewilding projects: WILDCARD, which uses satellite and field data from hundreds of locations to quantify to unveil the impacts of two rewilding approaches, and REWRITE, which is embracing rewilding as a nature-based solution to restore Europe's intertidal areas. By rewilding together, we aim to further the impact of rewilding to help the EU reach its climate and biodiversity goals.
Establishing a new partnership for rewilding
Across Europe, nature and people are facing the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change, and our three projects hope to harness the power of rewilding to overcome these challenges.
Consequently, many of the themes addressed in our projects are complementary to each other, and by joining forces and expertise, we are able to make our results more impactful by covering a broader range of topics such as: how can rewilding help to tackle the climate-biodiversity-society crisis at the European level? What barriers and opportunities exist to ecological restoration? How can we properly engage stakeholders and citizens in the process?
Together, we are also helping to expand rewilding to new ecosystems. In the case of REWRITE’s research on coastal ecosystems, rewilding is a very novel approach. Thus, by bringing together knowledge and research from different projects, we can explore how the approach can begin to be transferred to our seascapes.
How are we rewilding together?
To achieve these goals, a key aspect of our collaboration is to study how rewilding processes are understood and accepted at different levels. In doing so, and by aligning our strategies for engaging stakeholders, we can understand how the general public, policymakers and local communities view rewilding on a European scale.
We are also working closely on communication, to spread the message of the benefits and limits of rewilding for nature recovery. Through these joint initiatives, such as our recent restoration policy event When Nature Can Do The Job and our Rewilding Voices initiative, we are able to reach wider audiences, and incorporate these diverse perspectives and needs into our visions for rewilding across Europe.
A joint vision for nature recovery in Europe
This collaboration is broadening our research in many aspects, but in order to achieve our joint vision for nature recovery in Europe, we want this legacy to live on beyond the end of our projects. Consequently, together we are developing the Rewilding Knowledge Hub, a new web platform and online community for sharing knowledge and resources on rewilding.
The Hub will create an online shared workspace and a knowledge repository for research outputs for anyone to access. Through this legacy, we hope the rewilding community across Europe will continue to grow, and we can rewild together even after our projects end.