Resource description:
Rewilding, defined as the passive management of ecological succession, aims to restore natural ecosystem processes by reducing human intervention in landscapes (Pereira and Navarro, 2015). As a strategy for biodiversity conservation, rewilding holds the potential to enhance ecosystems with minimal direct management. However, this shift from traditional land use, particularly farmland or forestry, to a rewilded
state often results in a loss of income for the land owners. This loss of income is the opportunity cost of rewilding, which represents the economic value forgone when transitioning land from productive uses, such as agriculture or timber harvesting, to a natural, unmanaged state (Adams et al., 2010). The opportunity cost of land conservation varies spatially, as the economic returns from farming or forestry depend on factors such
as soil quality, climate, farm technology, and market accessibility, each of which differs across locations. This spatial heterogeneity raises the question of how to prioritize areas for nature conservation in a cost-effective manner(Armsworth, 2014; Jung et al., 2024). While a rich a literature on nature conservation planning still many approached ignore competing land uses and land competition (Jung et al., 2024). This report focuses on the opportunity costs associated with rewilding, as part of the wildE project. The objective is to estimate these costs for farmland and forest land across Europe, with a particular focus on spatial heterogeneity. An important outcome is a set of maps showing the opportunity costs of rewilding on agricultural land under different assumptions.
Author/Contact:
Toho Hien (INRAE-BETA), Jens Abildtrup (INRAE-BETA),
Contributors: Cecilia Fraccaroli, Jette Bredahl Jacobsen, Tim Maarten de Kruiff, Dario Schulz, Sven Wunder