Encouraging and enabling people to live alongside bears and other wildlife in the Central Apennines of Italy is critical to the recovery of local nature. By fostering dialogue and collaborative solutions, bear-smart community committees will help to promote such coexistences across the landscape.
A loan from Rewilding Europe Capital will help Spanish start-up Nemétona to manufacture sustainable wooden construction panels, using timber sourced from forests in the Iberian Highlands. The company’s business model will benefit nature, climate, and local communities.
The recovery of nature in Croatia’s Velebit Mountains is enabling an economic shift from hunting to wildlife watching. By putting cameras in the hands of local students, and enabling them to connect with their natural environment, a recent photography workshop highlighted the social benefits of this transition.
In the Oder Delta, which is shared between Germany and Poland, many rivers have been negatively impacted by human intervention. Recent river restoration work carried out by the local rewilding team and partners on the Polish side is reinvigorating two tributaries of the Ina River, with benefits for nature and people.
Pioneering French NGO Vautours en Baronnies is working to restore populations of all four European vulture species in the southwestern French Alps. Membership of the European Rewilding Network will enable the team to share knowledge, enhancing the comeback of these magnificent, ecologically important birds across the continent.
Rewilding efforts are now supporting wildlife comeback in Portugal’s Greater Côa Valley. The first of a network of wildlife watching hides has just opened in the landscape, providing visitors with an exciting window onto this recovery and supporting the development of nature-based tourism.
The European wildcat is in danger of extinction in Portugal. The first confirmed sighting of a wildcat within a Greater Côa Valley rewilding site is therefore great news, highlighting the importance of landscape restoration efforts and targeted population support measures.
Rewilding is transforming the outlook for communities and nature in eastern Spain’s Iberian Highlands. A new documentary by award-winning filmmaker Emmanuel Rondeau, which recently premiered in one of the landscape’s most beautiful al fresco settings, tells an intimate story of this transformation.
Helping nature heal can lead to prosperous local economies. Nature-based business networks are being developed in a growing number of our rewilding landscapes, enabling businesses and communities to benefit from nature recovery in a sustainable way. This, in turn, is generating more support for rewilding.
The Atlantic sturgeon, a keystone species, was driven to functional extinction in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. Supported by a grant from Rewilding Europe’s European Wildlife Comeback fund, a pioneering initiative has seen this iconic fish reintroduced in a Swedish river for the first time ever.