wildE is a Horizon Europe project developing climate-smart rewilding as a nature-based solution to biodiversity loss and climate change.
Rewilding is becoming an increasingly popular approach to ecological restoration. However, until now this approach has mostly been limited to local conservation initiatives scattered across the continent.
A lack of research on the topic has limited rewilding’s contribution to important environmental policies and its adoption as a large-scale, systemic approach to restoration. To overcome these barriers, our research is:
wildE will identify factors that make rewilding attempts more likely to be successful by developing a framework for climate-smart rewilding and using European-wide data to identify rewilding opportunities. This work will provide a baseline of information that will inform all of the wildE project’s work.
Centred around our eight Rewilding Cases to understand local-scale outcomes of rewilding processes (active or passive) to assess their degree of climate-smart rewilding in terms of mitigating and adapting to climate change, biodiversity support, and benefits to local livelihoods.
Using advanced modeling techniques and rewilding scenarios, wildE aims to better understand how environmental and societal changes in the future might affect the potential for rewilding in Europe. wildE models will provide insights on the longer-term the costs and benefits of rewilding at a European, country and regional level.
