Rewilding: Revisiting the HOPE Anthology one year later

What better way to celebrate World Rewilding Day than by revisiting our interview with Richard Bunting of Rewilding Britain and Trees for Life for our HOPE anthology, and seeing how rewilding in the UK has progressed since then?

One year ago, we interviewed Richard Bunting for our anthology HOPE: Visions of a Better Future. As a spokesperson for Rewilding Britain who also works with Trees for Life and the Scottish Rewilding Alliance, Bunting was able to give expert insight into the amazing potential of rewilding not just to halt the biodiversity crisis, but actually to start reversing it.

Rewilding, he explained, helps to provide resilient habitats and thriving ecosystems as well as carbon sinks and numerous mental health benefits. Alongside this, Bunting offered a vision of the UK in 2030: restored to a nature-rich, biodiverse nation, filled with fresh opportunities. It is a beautiful, optimistic vision to set against the UK’s most recent State of Nature report, which indicates that the UK is severely nature-depleted with nearly one in six species at risk of being lost.

It is more than just a vision though, it is a goal. Bunting made this clear by illustrating the incredible number of projects and plans Rewilding Britain has launched and is continuing to nurture on a path towards that goal. But, even with all these efforts, it can be hard to know if we are moving in the right direction fast enough, or to really feel the momentum behind rewilding building. So, with this in mind, we wanted to check in with the state of rewilding in the UK one year on from the interview, and see how things are progressing.

“You see the biggest biodiversity benefits when rewilding happens over a large scale,” Bunting said in our anthology interview. By building partnerships between grassroots organisations, landowners, land managers, farmers, tenants, estate owners, NGOs and communities, Rewilding Britain has been able to take on rewilding at a huge scale. 3 years ago, they launched The Rewilding Network, aiming to catalyse and support the rewilding of at least 121,406 hectares of land and additional marine areas within 3 years.

This year they have found that they have exceeded that target by over 20%, with members of the network actively rewilding 155,248 hectares of land and 506km² of seabed in counting. One of the network’s pioneering projects – The Knepp Estate – has already seen the unprecedented natural return of some rare species such as turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, and purple emperor butterflies.

Rewilding Britain also funds one large-scale rewilding project each year through its Challenge Fund to the tune of £100,000. 2023’s winner was Kent Wildlife Trust, home to the UK’s first reintroduced European bison, aiming to rewild and restore one of the largest continuous areas of ancient woodland in southern England. 2024’s winner is the Sussex Bay project, aiming to restore 100 miles of coastland from Chichester to Kent.

Large-scale rewilding isn’t just blossoming in the UK, though. In November 2023, Rewilding Britain also launched the European Rewilding Coalition, becoming one of 45 European organisations involved in a coalition setting out unifying principles to guide Europe-wide nature recovery strategies. Currently spanning 16 countries, these organisations are working together to share challenges and successes and work together to find the best solutions. 

In our anthology interview with Richard Bunting, he also spoke enthusiastically about the opportunities that open up alongside rewilding, such as nature-based tourism, education, recreation and visitor attractions, helping to create and diversify jobs and volunteering opportunities. One project that Bunting mentioned in the interview, which is currently seeing benefits exactly like these, is the flagship Trees for Life project working to reconnect fragments of the Caledonian forest in Scotland by growing and planting 60,000 trees every year. Within the bounds of this project, the world’s first ‘Rewilding Centre’ has been opened over the last year: the Dundreggan Rewilding Centre.

Already, the centre has hosted Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin, ITV’s This Morning, and been awarded an international tourism award. Visitors can book residential experiences, learn about rewilding from experts involved in the project, or generally explore the forest and participate in other family activities. They hope it will be the first rewilding centre of many.      

At the time of the anthology interview, Rewilding Britain was also calling for 30% of Britain to be undergoing major nature restoration by 2030. Though action taken towards these targets by the UK government has been slow, there have been a series of small successes over the last year. Last summer, Defra announced England’s first Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs): three sites were given complete protection from activities that could negatively impact their marine ecosystems. These initial HPMAs will help protect some of our most precious marine species and habitats such as honeycomb worm reefs, northern gannets, and harbour porpoises.

This makes clear progress towards the government’s ‘30 by 30’ goal of restoring 30% of our land and sea by 2030, and hopefully, the success of these designations will lead the way for future designations and projects.

The UK’s Environment Secretary also announced at the end of last year a new “package” to tackle climate change, providing £25 million of funding for a new National Park, new forests, and 34 landscape recovery projects, many of which are linked to the Rewilding Network. England’s new environmental policy on biodiversity net gain has also been launched this February, meaning that most new developments will now have to provide a 10% net gain in biodiversity, which has to be maintained for at least 30 years. 

Beyond the UK, the EU has introduced a Nature Restoration Law to restore ecosystems for people, the climate, and the planet. The law introduces legally binding targets for restoring around 20% of the EU’s land and sea by 2030 and all degraded ecosystems by 2050. It lays out specific targets for habitat improvement and enlargement, protecting pollinator populations, sustainable forest management, river connectivity, and restoring and protecting urban, agricultural, and marine ecosystems. 

Another of the key takeaways from our interview with Richard Bunting was that species reintroduction is a key part of rewilding. With the example of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, he pointed out how key species reintroduction can cause a positive “trophic cascade” effect throughout the whole ecosystem. There have been several great reintroduction success stories over the last year, with last September seeing a baby beaver spotted in London for the first time in 400 years.

Just over a year after Enfield Council reintroduced beavers as part of a natural flood-management programme, this particular beaver kit is evidence that the couple at Enfield have made themselves at home; expanding their lodge, making dams, and breeding, all of which contributes to flood defences that protect hundreds of homes in the local area southeast of the borough. There are now an estimated 1,000 beavers living wild in Britain’s streams and rivers.

This past year has also seen the first white-tailed eagle chick hatch in England for more than 240 years, following successful reintroduction projects in Scotland. In Scotland, a new eagle species is taking a foothold, with a record 46 golden eagles reported. Eagles provide an important missing puzzle in ecosystems, acting as apex predators that help move nutrients through food chains, control other species populations, and clean up dead or dying animals. 

Over the last year, discussions have also started about lynx reintroduction in the Scottish Parliament. While it is understood that lynx once lived in Scotland and reintroduction would contribute to nutrient cycling, vegetation and tree regeneration, carcass provision for other species, and inexpensive deer population management, there are still concerns over the unknowns of sharing a landscape with these big cats. While only 52% of the adults polled in the study strongly or somewhat supported lynx reintroduction, these discussions are a hugely important step.

As Bunting said in our anthology interview, species reintroduction is not just about having a habitat that is ready, healthy, and big enough, it also requires public support to welcome and accept reintroductions. Community support and happiness are fundamental to finding solutions that are as beneficial as possible to both people and the planet. Hopefully, further success with site-specific reintroductions will provide the evidence needed to move forward with these discussions. 

In yet another flagship rewilding project, Trees for Life and Woodland Trust Scotland have recently launched a mission to rediscover Scotland’s ‘lost’ native pinewoods amongst the site of the ancient Caledonian Forest which once covered an area 10 times the size of modern-day Greater London. The Wild Pine Project aims to document, through historical documents and anecdotal reports, where Scotland’s pine forests once stood and to revive them. Using historical maps and ecological and landscape evidence, they hope to add significantly to the Caledonian Pinewood Inventory’s list of 84 recognised sites and restore these threatened ecosystems to thriving habitats.   

Similarly, the National Trust has created plans for new areas of temperate rainforest in the south-west of England, which will see more than 100,000 trees planted in north Devon to help save threatened plant life from the brink of extinction. The project will cover 50 hectares. It is hoped that re-connecting large swathes of woodlands and protecting and expanding other areas in wet Devon will allow unique species such as pine martens and rare ferns to re-establish themselves and will allow what is nearly the entire remaining global population of species such as the Devon whitebeam to expand and secure themselves.

With all of these fantastic rewilding projects in progress and planned for the future, Richard Bunting’s vision of a thriving and biodiverse UK full of opportunity by 2030 looks more achievable every day.