At Rewilding Europe, we want to demonstrate rewilding at scale. By amplifying access to land, our new Rewilding Land Facility will help us to realise this ambition.
Taking land access to the next level
Today, a growing window of opportunity is opening across Europe to give space back to nature. But turning this opportunity into reality demands more than vision – it requires swift, strategic action to access land at scale. To enable such action, Rewilding Europe is excited to officially launch the Rewilding Land Facility, which will accelerate the scaling up of rewilding across Europe – and the benefits this delivers to people, climate, and nature – by increasing the amount of land under direct rewilding management.
“Rewilding Europe is developing a lot of great rewilding showcases within our landscapes at grassroots level, but these are still small when you look at the bigger picture,” says Rewilding Europe’s Head of Wilder Nature, Carolina Soto-Navarro. “We need access to larger scale areas.
“This means we need to be able to respond to opportunities that come up across our landscapes – such as the acquisition of management rights to a grazing or hunting concession, for example – in a flexible, rapid, and contextual way. The Rewilding Land Facility will help us do this.”
“We need to be able to respond to opportunities that come up across our landscapes – such as the acquisition of management rights to a grazing or hunting concession, for example – in a flexible, rapid, and contextual way. The Rewilding Land Facility will help us do this.”
Carolina Soto-Navarro
Rewilding Europe’s Head of Wilder Nature
Supporting the scaling up of rewilding
Rewilding can help regenerate ecosystems and support new forms of sustainable land stewardship that align with local socio-economic needs. This opens the door to large-scale restoration that works with natural processes, fostering resilient landscapes that provide meaningful benefits to people and nature.
For Rewilding Europe, accessing land at scale is critical, enabling us to demonstrate how nature recovery can deliver such benefits. It allows us to carry out a whole range of interventions – from rewilding forests and rivers, supporting wildlife comeback, and enhancing natural grazing, to rewetting peatlands, restoring steppe vegetation, and removing obsolete infrastructure. This, in turn, helps us to inspire other land managers and landowners to follow our rewilding approach.
A strategic leap forward
Rewilding Europe’s ambition is to reach 500,000 hectares of land and water under direct rewilding management across 15 rewilding landscapes by 2030. At the end of 2024, Rewilding Europe and our landscape partners had just under 65,000 hectares of land under such management, a more than threefold increase over 2018.
Complementing this growth, we are also expanding the area of land where rewilding is happening in one form or another – within and outside our landscapes – through partnerships with landowners and land managers. This “land under rewilding influence” covered just over 811,000 hectares by the end of 2024, representing a 27% increase over 2023. Our ambition is to reach at least 1 million hectares by 2030.
Despite the significant progress that we’re making accessing new land for rewilding within our rewilding landscapes, there is a clear need to accelerate the process. This is the overall aim of the Rewilding Land Facility.
How will the Rewilding Land Facility work?
Within the Rewilding Land Facility is a ring-fenced pool of capital called the “Rewilding Land Fund”. Grants will be disbursed from this fund to our local rewilding entities, such as Rewilding Spain and Rewilding Rhodopes, enabling them to purchase different types of land or user rights – from concessions and long-term leases to direct land ownership. This will give them a stronger role in and control over their own rewilding goals, supporting the long-term growth of rewilding and nature-based economies within each landscape.
Carolina Soto-Navarro is keen to stress that the facility is not about prioritising the actual buying of land, but other types of management rights or ownership such as concessions, stewardship, and easements, which allow us to rewild the land without necessarily taking possession of it.
“To rewild at scale we want to access land via a patchwork model,” she explains. “Land in Europe is typically very expensive, so purchasing it offers a very low return on investment in terms of scaling up rewilding. Owning land can also bring a lot of additional costs. Our aim is to access land through a multi-pathway approach, with the common goal of restoring landscapes for wildlife and people.”
Encouraging progress
Thanks to generous contributions from a growing number of donors, including Sub3, Tanka, and the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme, Rewilding Europe has so far raised 7.4 million euros for the Land Fund. Grants have already been disbursed to a number of landscape teams, boosting their access to land.
In the Iberian Highlands rewilding landscape in Spain, a 380,000-euro grant enabled the team to purchase a 190-hectare property called Cañada de las Pegueras in late 2024.
“This is an important piece of land because it contains the source of the Júcar River, one of the most important rivers in Spain,” explains Rewilding Spain team leader Pablo Schapira. “We will rewild the property, increase forest maturity, improve public access, and ensure that this source remains protected.”
Critical purchases
While the main focus of the Rewilding Land Facility is to move away from direct property purchases, all the land purchased to date has been critical in terms of advancing rewilding efforts. In addition to Cañada de las Pegueras, Land Fund grants disbursed in 2024 enabled the Rewilding Rhodopes in Bulgaria to purchase land containing a souslik colony, and the Rewilding Apennines team to purchase land that contained an important source of white-clawed crayfish, which they are breeding and releasing in local rivers.
The largest and most exciting land purchase enabled by the Rewilding Land Facility to date has been Ultima Frontiera, a 766-hectare former fish farm concession located in the Romanian part of the Danube Delta rewilding landscape. The site, which hosts a stunning array of wildlife species – including white-tailed eagles, white and Dalmatian pelicans, wildcats, and golden jackals – has more recently been used for wildlife photography, with a hotel and multiple hides. Moving forwards, the concession will be transformed through various rewilding measures – supporting wetland restoration and natural wildlife comeback – while the hotel will be restored to drive the growth of sustainable tourism.
Taking rewilding to the next level
Looking to the future, Carolina Soto-Navarro is optimistic about the prospect of scaling up land access, with the Rewilding Land Facility playing a driving role.
“This is a bold new phase for Rewilding Europe – moving beyond our pilot stage to really rewild at scale, in partnership with our dedicated landscape teams. By boosting access to land and changing the way it is managed in collaboration with local stakeholders, the Rewilding Land Facility will act as a powerful mechanism for amplifying the benefits rewilding delivers to people and nature.”
Partner with us
We’re seeking impact-driven donors and investors to grow the Rewilding Land Fund and unlock more space for nature across Europe.
Your support will:
- Enable strategic land deals for rewilding
- Accelerate the scaling of rewilding efforts across Europe
- Deliver long-term benefits for nature, people, and climate
If you are interested or want to know more, please contact Carolina Soto-Navarro, Head of Wilder Nature and Chair of the Rewilding Land Facility.
Want to know more?
Much of this news item is taken from a longer story entitled “Amplifying land access”, which featured in the Rewilding Europe Annual Review 2024.
Download a PDF of the story Or check out our Annual Review 2024