- Rewilding — the process of letting nature take over — is gaining momentum across the globe with several grassroots organizations working on efforts to restore landscapes.
- Global Rewilding Alliance (GRA), an umbrella organization with nearly 300 partner organizations across six continents, aims to bring these efforts together and help rewilders collaborate and learn from each other.
- In an interview with Mongabay, executive director Alister Scott shares what rewilding looks like in practice, challenges it faces and how his organization is helping rewilders take the movement forward.
Rewilding — the process of letting nature take over — is having its moment across the world at every scale.
From an 18th-century abandoned farm in the French Alps, to a volcanic lake in Indonesia, to primates being brought back into Brazil’s national parks, to restoring Kalahari’s savanna ecosystem in South Africa — conservationists are tirelessly using nature’s landscape engineers to restore its wild ways. And, in many cases, it’s working: Birds are returning to their once-abandoned abodes, more carbon is getting into the ground, the earth is cooling down, animals once thought locally extinct are reappearing and ecosystems on the whole are getting healthier.
This transformation is not limited to land. In marine protected areas — where industrial fishing and other extractive activities are banned — coral reefs are once again teeming with marine life, fish are thriving and whales are making a comeback. As the world slowly inches towards the ambitious 30×30 goal, earmarking 30% of Earth’s land and oceans as protected areas by 2030, rewilding is poised to play a catalyst.
In the last two decades, various rewilding projects aimed at bringing back species and restoring whole ecosystems have sprung. But most have been siloed, evolving separately from each other. In 2021, the Global Rewilding Alliance (GRA) was formed to bring together these efforts, strengthen collaboration and connect rewilders across continents. Today, the alliance connects nearly 300 organizations across six continents, which are together rewilding more than 2 million square kilometers (760,000 square miles) of land — about the size of Mexico — and 6 million km2 (2.3 million mi2) of ocean.
In an interview with Mongabay, Alister Scott, executive director of the GRA, talks about the essence of rewilding and how his organization brings together rewilders as the planet faces biodiversity loss and climate change.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: What is rewilding and how is it different from ecosystem conservation and restoration?
Alister Scott: Rewilding tries to allow natural processes to unfold, and we will try to do as little as possible. We’re quite a lazy bunch! Rewilding organizations are interested and focused on reinstating fully functioning, whole ecosystems with all of their component parts.
If you’re adopting a conservation approach, where you have to manage a habitat exactly for the requirements of a species for it to breed and survive, it’s often very expensive because it’s intensive. That’s not a strategy for the future. What we need is bigger spaces. We have these 3-Cs of rewilding — bigger ‘core areas’, ‘corridors’ to connect up the core areas so that creatures can move, and ‘carnivores’ to drive ecosystem functions and to create balance. The fourth one is the crucial central role of grazing animals in most ecosystems. We don’t have a word beginning with ‘c’ other than ‘chewers,’ so we call them chewers.
If you look at the ecological restoration movement, it is overwhelmingly focused on plant communities. What is distinctive about rewilding is that there’s a realization that often wild animals drive ecosystem health, and paradoxically, will help the recovery of plant communities even though they eat and trample them. Rewilding places a central emphasis on reintroducing wild animals that have gone missing through extermination.
Research shows that wild animals have a very significant role in the global carbon cycle, and that when you bring back wild animals, you often double the amount of carbon that can be sequestered by an ecosystem, and sometimes up to 12 times.
For example, after European settlers came to North America, the beaver was almost eradicated, and whole states like Wyoming dried out as a result. Now, the beaver is being brought back, and their work as an ecosystem engineer — by reducing flooding and holding water in the landscape — creates habitats for hundreds of other species and reduces drought.
Mongabay: Why was the Global Rewilding Alliance started and how does it help rewilders?
Alister Scott: Rewilding is popping up all around the world. There are rewilding organizations working largely in isolation. Because of that, they’re a long way from anywhere. The first time we talk to an organization, there’s often tears. People, be it in Brazil rewilding howler monkeys or in Australia reinstating grazed landscapes, are saying to us it’s just so nice not to be alone and how wonderful it’d be to be part of a global network. So that’s the basic premise of any alliance.
A growing piece of our function is to enable knowledge exchange. We have two task forces on rewilding wetlands and on rangelands and grasslands in the context of the international year of rangelands and pastoralists. And so, we’ve brought together our partners who are all working on these ecosystems and helping them to work together, to learn from each other’s case studies.
One of the things that we invested early on was some research that we discovered that shows wild animals have a very significant role in the global carbon cycle. When you bring back wild animals, you often double the amount of carbon that can be sequestered by an ecosystem, and sometimes up to 12 times. We are now conducting a series of case studies around the world in deliberately different ecosystems in South America, Mexico, the Congo Basin and Bahrain. We hope in a couple of years’ time to have a broad base of case studies to be able to do two things. First, to say definitively that nature is the original and best climate technology and helping nature’s recovery is our best strategy for stabilizing the global climate. And second, to provide credible science-based information for governments so that they start incorporating this insight into their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Mongabay: How does rewilding look in practice and what considerations are necessary?
Alister Scott: Historical ecological knowledge is essential here. Without that, you could look out the window and suffer from what we call shifting baseline syndrome, where you think that what you’re seeing out there [a degraded version of nature and ecosystems*] is normal. So, we absolutely need ecological knowledge, but it needs to have historical humility and be willing to challenge a few of its paradigms and dig deeper into the past.
Rewilding can happen on any scale. We’ve identified five levels of rewilding. Most rewilding that goes on in developed countries is of level 1 [very small areas being helped to be a bit wilder*], 2 [introducing proxies of wild animals in relatively small areas, often using ancient breeds/local varieties of domesticated animals*] and 3 [larger areas, with some introductions of wild animals but with many species still absent*], but as you get into bigger landscapes and seascapes then you can move on to reinstating everything — all of the predators, grazing animals, meso predators and so on.
For example, in the Iberá wetlands in Argentina, which is now turned into a national park, many of the animal species were missing when Rewilding Argentina and The Conservation Land Trust Argentina, bought the land. What had happened in that landscape is that not only had it been overgrazed by gauchos, but a lot of cattle were killed by extreme flooding because of upstream deforestation. At the time, giant otters [Pteronura brasiliensis], jaguars [Panthera onca] and ocelots [Leopardus pardalis] were missing, and some grazing animals, like capybaras [Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris], were in great numbers because they had no predators.
Now that they’ve started to bring back the jaguar and the ocelot, the number of ground-nesting birds is going up. Without the top predators, the number of mesopredators like foxes went up, and they were eating all the ground-nesting birds. Now that the fox numbers are balancing because of the jaguars that kill the foxes, you’re actually seeing more ground-nesting birds. [Their return also translates to plant communities; as the predators such as*] jaguars and the other cat species are starting to control the capybara population, and the whole plant communities are balancing out and recovering, becoming healthier. Now they have done the world’s first reintroduction of giant otters into that ecosystem, which is an incredible feat. This is the type of thing about rewilding that blows my mind.
Mongabay: What does success with rewilding look like?
Alister Scott: Anybody can do a bit of rewilding, if they have a little garden, even on a windowsill. You can have some flowering plants, and the bees will come, and you’re doing everything a favor. Success is nature coming back of her own accord, me doing very little. In my garden, that’s having grass snakes, slow worms, toads, frogs and wildflowers return on their own. That’s on the very micro level.
On a global scale, when you’ve got a whole landscape, one is to stop further extinctions as far as possible. Second, to reinstate decent numbers of wild animal species that would have been there because they are, in turn, going to drive the ecosystem process and reinstate the health — that’s often about either reintroducing species that have gone completely missing, or reinforcing populations that are still just hanging on. Lastly, providing adequate space for all of the natural processes — water flow, the carbon cycle, predation and so on — to take place.
Mongabay: How does rewilding benefit people, especially Indigenous peoples and local communities?
Alister Scott: Science has shown pretty definitively that where Indigenous groups have control of their land, wild nature tends to do better and those ecosystems tend to be much healthier. So clearly, Indigenous peoples are a huge ally. All of our alliance partners work hand in hand with local communities and Indigenous peoples and put their knowledge and their control at the center of those projects. They live there after all.
Local communities need a bit of help on things like legal stuff, setting up a viable business model, etc., and if you can have a rewilding organization figure those things out, I think that’s a really good partnership.
If we can pin down the carbon benefits of rewilding different ecosystems, that’s potentially a source of revenue. The proceeds can then go towards looking after national parks and wild animal species reintroductions.
Mongabay: What are some challenges rewilders face today?
Alister Scott: Funding is challenging.
Then there’s public perceptions — there’s active opposition amongst some parts of the press and political spectrum to rewilding. Some organizations go out of the way to spread nefarious rumors that rewilders are throwing people off their land, they’re reducing the ability to feed ourselves, and they want to bring back predators to the neighborhood. That sort of divisive thing is a challenge for all of us. We just have to get our heads down, communicate about rewilding, show what it’s like in practice, focus on the benefits and draw more and more people into our movement, and that’s happening. You win the argument one conversation at a time. For me, it’s about reaching enough people with reasonable evidence and arguments, showing up where they are, being a decent person and also doing our homework.
For example, on predators, we think about what might be some solutions to promote human-wildlife coexistence. In Italy, the local rewilding organization, Rewilding Apennines, is working closely with the community to put up fences to stop the bears and the wolves coming in and picking fruit from the orchards and taking chickens. Most rewilding organizations have this very positive, solution-oriented approach that says we’re advocates of wild nature and we need to take responsibility for helping communities to adapt.
I just think the process of change can often get people’s fears moving and by the time their fears have been allayed, they don’t even remember that they had them back then.
Mongabay: What does the future look like for the rewilding movement?
Alister Scott: I have no doubt that rewilding is going to become mainstream for landowners, but also as a policy option for governments. The evidence is so strong and compelling. We’re in phase three of the rewilding movement globally, which I’m calling “preparing for scaling.” We’re about to go up the steep bit of the ‘S curve’ of adoption.
About 50% of the world’s economy is directly related to the health of wild nature, and everything else stems from it. I see more and more governments getting it, more and more financiers getting it. People are getting it now. What they lack is specific mechanisms to enable them to do that, and that’s what we’re working on — to make nature’s recovery into an investable asset class, so the big money can flow, and that people can have this as part of their portfolio.
Banner image: American bison and calf in Yellowstone National Park, U.S. Image by Arturo de Frias Marques via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Spoorthy Raman is a staff writer at Mongabay, covering all things wild with a special focus on lesser-known wildlife, the wildlife trade, and environmental crime.
Editor’s note (May 5, 2026): Clarifications were added to this story post-publication. The are denoted by *.
Citations:
Aburto-Oropeza, O., Erisman, B., Galland, G. R., Mascareñas-Osorio, I., Sala, E., & Ezcurra, E. (2011). Large recovery of fish biomass in a No-Take marine reserve. PLoS ONE, 6(8), e23601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023601
Schmitz, O. J., Sylvén, M., Atwood, T. B., Bakker, E. S., Berzaghi, F., Brodie, J. F., . . . Ylänne, H. (2023). Trophic rewilding can expand natural climate solutions. Nature Climate Change, 13(4), 324–333. doi:10.1038/s41558-023-01631-6
McKinstry, M. C., Caffrey, P., & Anderson, S. H. (2001). The importance of beaver to wetland habitats and waterfowl in Wyoming. JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 37(6), 1571–1577. doi:10.1111/j.1752-1688.2001.tb03660.x
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