Rewilding Report Finds Land Use, Wildfire Risk and Local Trust Can Shape Conflict
Quick summary
The wildE project reviewed 269 papers and ran 40 interviews across eight European rewilding case studies.
Research literature focuses on wildlife, but local disputes often centred on farming, forestry, housing and other land uses.
Stakeholders linked land abandonment to higher wildfire risk; responses included grazing, fuel strips and prescribed burning.
Involving local people early mattered, and the authors recommend describing management changes precisely rather than saying “rewilding”.
A new Horizon Europe report on rewilding has found that disputes over restoring natural processes are often rooted as much in land use, livelihoods, wildfire risk and decision-making as in wildlife itself.
The wildE project combined a review of 269 scientific papers with analysis of European policy and research across eight rewilding case studies. Researchers also carried out 40 stakeholder interviews between 2024 and 2026 and gathered evidence through workshops in four of the study areas.
For land managers, one of the more relevant findings is that reducing human intervention does not always remove the need for active management. In several case studies, particularly in southern Europe, land abandonment and vegetation regrowth were linked by stakeholders to greater wildfire risk.
Responses included grazing, mechanical fuel reduction, fuel-management strips and prescribed burning.
Wildlife dominates the research literature
The systematic review began with 2,570 articles identified through Scopus and Web of Science. After screening, the researchers read and coded 269 peer-reviewed papers published in English.
Only 78 explicitly used the term “rewilding”; the other 191 were included because they dealt with processes the authors considered consistent with rewilding, such as restoring ecological processes, increasing connectivity or reducing human intervention.
Wildlife featured heavily. The report says 56% of rewilding-related conflicts in the reviewed literature concerned large animals, mainly carnivores, with wolves alone appearing in 63 papers.
Farmers were the stakeholder group most commonly discussed. Hunters, landowners and local communities also featured prominently.
The researchers divided conflicts into four broad types: differences over material interests, values, knowledge and the process by which decisions are made. That distinction is important because different disagreements require different responses.
Financial compensation may help where a land-use change creates measurable costs, for example, but is unlikely by itself to resolve a dispute about whose knowledge counts or what a landscape should be for.
On the ground, land use was often more important
The eight case studies covered Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Poland, Germany, Ireland and Sweden. Activities ranged from peatland rewetting and floodplain restoration to natural forest regeneration, grazing, prescribed burning and non-intervention.
The conflicts encountered there were broader than the wildlife-heavy academic literature might suggest. Farming, forestry, tourism, housing, renewable energy and recreation all competed for land.
The report also cautions against assuming that abandoned or economically marginal land will be straightforward to rewild. In Portugal, for example, abandonment was associated with depopulation, loss of traditional land uses and increased vegetation growth.
The authors found no simple relationship between land value, abandonment and levels of conflict. Land can carry cultural, historical and livelihood value that is not reflected in its market price.
Wildfire exposes the limits of a simple ‘hands-off’ approach
Fire is one of the clearest examples of the tension between reducing management and managing risk.
In the Barcelona Metropolitan Region and the Portuguese Antarr and Baixo Sabor cases, the report says farmland abandonment and subsequent forest or shrub regeneration can increase fuel accumulation.
In Barcelona, dense forest growth around an expanding urban area was a particular concern for fire managers.
Stakeholders described a range of responses. Around Barcelona these included understorey thinning, selective tree removal and maintaining access routes for firefighters.
Antarr used fuel-management strips. In Baixo Sabor, shrubs were mechanically removed and grazing by donkeys was used to reduce vegetation. In Sweden, prescribed burning was combined with grazing as part of management intended to restore particular forest characteristics.
The Barcelona case study is particularly revealing. Forest managers and fire-prevention representatives viewed unmanaged spontaneous forest expansion critically because they believed it could increase fire risk near urban areas. Other participants supported using grazing animals and other ecological processes to manage vegetation.
Trust can matter as much as technical evidence
Across the policy analysis, literature review and case studies, a repeated theme was the importance of involving affected people before decisions are effectively settled.
Stakeholder engagement was the main conflict-management approach identified through the interviews. Compensation was also prominent, but the term was used more broadly than direct payments. It included infrastructure, training, new skills, local employment and protection from hazards such as wildfire.
History mattered too. Several case studies contained longstanding distrust of governments, conservation bodies or large companies arising from previous changes in land ownership or management.
The authors argue that consultation after a proposal has already become contentious is less effective than working with local people from the outset.
Even the word “rewilding” could create difficulties. The researchers found that people used it to mean different things and sometimes attached strong political or emotional associations to it. Their recommendation is straightforward: describe the proposed management change precisely rather than relying on broad labels or “marketing phrases”.
What the evidence shows
Reducing human intervention is not a simple or uniform prescription. In working landscapes, questions about fire, grazing, forestry, farming, water, wildlife and public access remain.
Decisions about how much management to retain are therefore likely to depend heavily on local ecological conditions, existing land uses and the knowledge of people who manage and live in those landscapes.
