The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world and the climate, nature and health crises demand that we reverse the worrying trend of wildlife decline, missed climate targets and growing pollution. Rewilding is increasingly being considered as a nature recovery option with the potential to enhance both biodiversity and ecosystem services.
The Roots of Change project is about furthering understanding of how rewilding approaches on a landscape scale could be beneficial for both nature and people. We are considering a diverse range of perspectives and beneficiaries including those who work in farming and for food security.
We want to support anyone developing policy around food, farming, and farming-based nature recovery to understand how rewilding principles can be integrated into our work in a way that prioritises social and ecological justice.
The project is a collaboration between the Institute of Development Studies, the University of Sussex, and Sustain, including Nadine Beard, Dr Lidia Cabral, Karan Shinghal, Dr Christopher Sandom and Ruth Westcott.
What is rewilding?
“Rewilding, is giving the land back to wildlife and wildlife back to the land.”
John Davis, Rewilding Institute
Rewilding incorporates a family of conservation approaches with the ultimate aim of recreating diverse and self-regulating ecosystems. Rewilding focuses on increasing biodiversity, creating ecosystems that can be resilient to drought, flooding and other climate change impacts, and reintroducing native species. It is about letting nature recover in its own direction without setting species and habitat specific management targets (Lorimer et al. 2015). It usually comprises reducing human control and management of ecosystems.
In the context of this project, we define rewilding as any activity that intentionally aims to “restore self-sustaining and complex ecosystems, with interlinked ecological processes that promote and support one another while minimizing or gradually reducing human interventions.” (Perino et al, 2019).
The rewilding concept is plastic, and there are diverse approaches on a scale of intervention intensity that can be conducive to the pluralistic aims of nature recovery, compassion and coexistence.
There is a growing consensus that to safeguard the ecosystem services that underpin human existence – particularly averting catastrophic climate change - there is a need for large-scale ecological restoration (UN, 2019). Landscape-scale rewilding is typically defined as having core protected areas, with ecological connectivity between these areas and the prioritisation of keystone species. This was refined with the addition of climate resilience (Carroll & Noss, 2020), compassion (Bekoff, 2014; Kopnina et al., 2019), and coexistence (Johns, 2019).
Why is the discourse around rewilding and farming important?
Rewilding has the potential to profoundly change landscapes and people–nature relations. With farming taking up 71% UK land, farmers are key stakeholders in debates about nature recovery and land use change. They may be both affected by and influence the trajectory of such initiatives in the United Kingdom and globally.
There is a necessity and urgency around land-use change in the UK. The food system globally is responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions and emissions from farming in the UK have not significantly reduced since 1990. The UK has mandatory climate and nature recovery targets that require a change in the way land is used.
At the same time many small scale and family farmers are experiencing multifaceted challenges. They are experiencing lower yields as a result of climate change and rapid industrialisation of the farming system, with more and more power and control in the hands of large agribusinesses rather than farmers. The total number of farms in the EU decreased by 5.3 million between 2005 and 2020, with 87% of these closures being small farms on less than 5 hectares.
An increasingly industrialised farming system, promising ‘cheap food’, has not coincided with a reduction in food poverty. Food Foundation estimates that 7.2 million adults (13.6% of households) experienced food insecurity in June 2024. Trussel Trust, a food bank network, indicated that 2024 saw persistently high levels of food assistant need, with an increase in distributed food parcels of 94% over the past five years – in 2024 alone the network distributed more than 3.1 million emergency food parcels, of which 1.1 million went to children.
On the whole, the UK is not delivering outcomes that prioritise public wellbeing including dietary health, food security, wildlife recovery or reducing food system inequalities. For example, an estimated 85% UK farmland is used either for livestock grazing or growing feed for animals, which is a pressing risk to climate and nature recovery and UK food security.
The Policy Context:
The UK has a number of targets that create a supportive context for rewilding. Net zero targets are enshrined in law and proposed emissions pathways include significantly increasing the amount of land used for nature recovery and CO2 sequestration. The UK has also committed to the international target of protecting 30% of the UK’s land and sea for nature by 2030. The Environment Act 2021 sets overall targets of:
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Restoring or creating more than 500,000 new hectares of wildlife-rich habitat by 2042
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Halting the decline in biodiversity by 2030
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Reducing the risk of species' extinction by 2042
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Increasing tree canopy and woodland cover to 16.5% of total land area
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Reducing nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment pollution of the water environment from agricultural land by 40% by 2038.
However, locally and nationally, the policy environment may present a barrier to the delivery of these targets and the broader implementation of nature recovery projects and food system transformation. Such policies include farm payment schemes, planning, and public procurement.
Farmers also access to a range of information and resources that can support knowledge around rewilding, including the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), which gives ‘trusted, independent environmental advice to farmers helping them understand the environmental value of their land and make the most of the agri-environment options available’.
2025 may present opportunities to incorporate just and equitable rewilding to into policy more concretely, for example:
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England’s land use framework: Launched in February 2025, the government is consulting on targets for a 9% reduction in agricultural land for nature recovery
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The National Food Strategy: To be developed through 2025
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Farming roadmap: Announced in January 2025, a 25-year roadmap is proposed to improve farming profitability and sustainability and is due later in 2025.
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Planning reform: A Planning and Infrastructure Bill is due in 2025, potentially including measures to make it easier to get planning permission to diversify farmland.
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The Devolution agenda – as part of the devolution white paper, government has set out plans for strategic authorities, which will become responsible for strategic planning and local nature recovery strategies
Why is a just transition needed?
A just transition refers broadly to embedding justice in the transition away from fossil fuels. While the concept has been around for a few decades, it recently gained popularity in global debates concerning climate change and net zero targets.
In the UK, efforts at environmental restoration and farming sustainability must be inextricable from the pursuit of social and cultural well-being, food security and fair livelihoods for farmers and farm workers. Farmers are being offered incentives to restore nature on their land as part of post-CAP farm payment schemes including Countryside Stewardship and Landscape Recovery funds. There has also been an increase in private nature recovery and offsetting schemes.
But there have been criticisms of some ‘nature based’ approaches as ignoring the inequalities of power and wealth that lock unsustainability into food systems – ie failing to reflect the principles of a just transition. So too of rewilding projects – with a study by WWF noting that ‘many in the farming community have perceived rewilding to be a direct attack on their livelihoods and ways of life’. A study by MikoÅ‚ajczak et al (2022) found that farmers’ attitudes to rewilding centred on five core issues: (a) the perceived need (or lack of) for restoration action, (b) the ecological effectiveness of rewilding, (c) rewilding's compatibility with ensuring food security, (d) rewilding's compatibility with rural lifestyles, livelihoods and economies and (e) multidimensional justice of rewilding initiatives.
Experiences of nature and the countryside also have racial and class dimensions. Quality green and blue spaces have significant benefits for both physical and mental health and wellbeing, but ethnic minorities are twice as likely to live in nature-poor neighbourhoods. The most deprived communities in England (as ranked in England’s index of multiple deprivation) are more than twice as likely as wealthy communities to live in areas with a low amount of natural space per person.
What are the principles of a socio-ecologically just transition?
We consider four principles of a just transition, building on the work by McCauley and Heffron and Wang and Lo. These people-centred principles can also be combined with one that places the rights and interests of people and nature as inextricable. Socio-ecological justice “is about recognising the right of human and non-human worlds to live and flourish together in their environments free from social and ecological destruction and degradation.”
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Recognition: Acknowledging the perspectives and standpoints of those, social groups and elements of natural systems, which may be affected by transition policies.
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Procedure: Ensuring fairness in decision-making processes related to transition processes, including the representation of the interests impacted by those processes.
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Distribution: Considering how social and natural beings are differently affected by policies because of their location, capabilities, and/or vulnerabilities and addressing those differences. For example, who are the winners and losers of transitions to net zero?
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Restoration: Repairing harm done to people and nature by fossil fuel-intensive farming, including restoring biodiversity and socio-cultural diversity of farming systems.
What This Project Will Do
Considering rewilding and farming from a socio-ecologically just transition perspective means considering numerous and intersecting aspects of injustices affecting nature and people, including:
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Biodiversity and habitat loss
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Soil degradation and water and aid contamination
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Land ownership
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Access to affordable and nutritious food
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Exclusion, racism and access to nature
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Decent livelihoods and working conditions
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Power and control
Roots of Change will incorporate field work and talk to a diverse range of stakeholders to explore:
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Where and how rewilding projects have successfully incorporated principles of a socio-ecologically just transition, and the perspectives of those in rewilded landscapes.
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The barriers to socio-ecologically just rewilding – including local and national policies, information, financial constraints, and how they may be overcome.
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How policy opportunities over the next 9 months can incorporate socio-ecologically just rewilding, and where the policy landscape offers opportunities, nationally and locally.
Bringing divides
Rewilding projects often involve diverse stakeholders with varying perspectives. As West et al (2024) discuss in their review of relational approaches to sustainability transformations, there is great value in the diversity of approaches to ecological and food system transformation. There are complex power relations and knowledge politics in rural landscapes and through this work we aim to analyse our own assumptions and values about land and justice and engage with other knowledges.
If you would like to know more – or if you are a policymaker in any context, and would like to get involved, please contact ruth@sustainweb.org
