The growth of rewilding in Britain offers hope for a wilder future in 2025

This year has shown that more and more people want to be a part of rewilding and understand the role it must play in tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. More than four in five Britons now support rewilding, and 77% believe the government should be doing more to reverse the decline of nature in Britain, according to polling we undertook with YouGov this year.

Rewilding cannot flourish without bringing people along with it – and 2025 promises a range of exciting species being reintroduced to Britain, from eagles to tauros. 

Rewilding is the large-scale restoration of nature to the point where it can take care of itself. It not only offers hope for tackling the nature and climate crises, but has the potential to create a cascade of social and economic benefits for people and communities. People – pioneers, communities, activists, ecologists – are at the heart of rewilding, as these moments from 2024 (alongside hundreds of others) show. 

• The comeback kids: The 5 ‘lost’ wildlife species returning from extinction to the UK
• ‘Nature is slowly healing’: How rewilding is bringing Britain’s extinct species back from the dead

The Restore Nature Now march was the largest ever rally for nature in the UK, with over 60,000 people in attendance. And this was the year that all political parties committed to declaring Scotland a Rewilding Nation. 

The call for change is louder than ever before, and the movement is growing with each passing year. This year we hit an amazing milestone of welcoming over 1,000 rewilding projects to our Rewilding Network, a community of rewilders based across Britain who are actively rewilding land and sea in innovative and exciting ways. When another project is born, expanded or linked with their neighbour, the pace of rewilding grows and more land and sea is recovered for nature. 

More people rewilding means more rewilding jobs being created, strengthening local economies and opening up more employment opportunities for rural communities. A survey to the Rewilding Network showed that, in Scotland, full-time equivalent jobs across 13 major rewilding projects increased from 24 before rewilding began to 123, an increase of over 400%. In England and Wales, full time equivalent jobs across 50 sites increased from 162 to 312, an increase of 93%. The variety of jobs has boomed too, and includes nature-based hospitality and tourism, estate management, ecology, environmental monitoring, rewilding interventions, recreation, and education. 

Whilst 2024 has brought growth – of rewilding and the movement behind it – it has also presented many challenges. Wildlife and Countryside Link’s latest 30×30 report showed that less than 3% of England’s land is currently effectively protected for nature (with less than 10% of England’s seas effectively protected), miles behind government targets set at COP16 of protecting 30% of England’s land and seas by 2030. 

We are also increasingly discovering that the protections that currently exist are not delivering for nature in the way that we need to. Highly damaging practices like dredging, mining and bottom-trawling are still permitted in the vast majority of marine-protected areas, meaning they are well off-track from achieving conservation targets. Even our national parks, areas that should be nature jewels in the crown of England, are failing on biodiversity, with just 6% of national park land in England and Wales currently effectively managed for nature. 

We need to radically rethink how we designate, protect and restore nature if we have any hope of meeting government targets for nature and climate, and rewilding offers us a way forward. One of the most radical ways we can demonstrate how effectively nature can recover if given the chance is through appropriate species reintroductions. Through bringing lost keystone species back into the landscapes which so sorely need them, we can see radical recovery take place alongside countless opportunities for growth through job creation, eco-tourism and education. 

There are some really exciting species reintroductions already on the horizon for 2025 and beyond, from herds of tauros to the Highlands to white-tailed eagles to Cumbria. These ground-breaking projects and those that came before are helping create the future we want to see: a wilder future that delivers for nature, climate, wildlife and people. I look forward to many more milestones, challenges, innovations and successes in rewilding in 2025, and I know that my favourite part of it all will be working alongside the amazing people who make it all possible.

Rebecca Wrigley is chief executive of Rewilding Britain.

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