Speaker
Description
Rewilding has emerged as a restoration approach that addresses societal challenges and promotes the benefits of nature restoration. It aims to restore wildlife, mitigate climate change, and create transformative change. However, scaling up rewilding efforts is challenging due to complex nature-people relationships. Effective landscape management and stakeholder engagement are crucial for successful rewilding. Participatory scenario planning and co-design can help understand the benefits and trade-offs of rewilding. We introduce a novel methodology using the Nature Futures Framework to address opportunities, co-benefits, and trade-offs for rewilding. The German Oder Delta was studied to identify appropriate rewilding actions based on diverse socio-ecological demands. We conducted stakeholder interviews to co-design three distinct scenarios reflecting diverse values of nature and rewilding strategies. The study identified a comprehensive set of actions to be implemented across the landscape. The findings suggest that diverse values related to nature are distributed heterogeneously across the landscape, requiring an adaptive management approach. By evaluating various perspectives on nature, preferred areas for rewilding actions were identified based on their role in providing intrinsic, utilitarian, and relational values. Regions closer to agricultural sites were favoured for carrying out biodiversity-friendly agricultural practices, such as paludiculture, emphasizing restoring natural disturbance dynamics. In the different scenarios, rivers were essential landscape elements for promoting intrinsic and material benefits from nature and landscape connectivity. Finally, rewilding actions, such as allowing a natural succession of abandoned grasslands and old-growth forests, were allocated in less fragmented areas and distant from urban infrastructure landscape areas. The findings emphasize the importance of considering pluralistic values when designing rewilding actions, underscoring the crucial role of stakeholders in highlighting areas with less resistance to rewilding and co-adapting to landscape changes. Recognizing the multiple values of nature can foster the successful implementation of rewilding measures and their upscaling to larger areas.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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