Rewilding has the potential to help address the current global biodiversity crisis, but its impact will be limited unless agreed definitions can be reached, backed by further scientific research and helped by a policy backdrop that enables greater integration with current environmental legislation.

Rewilding – a philosophy that aims to encourage greater diversity of wildlife through practices including land abandonment and reintroducing native species – has become increasingly fashionable among conservation commentators and policymakers in recent years.

Scientists are now calling for key pieces of legislation concerning biodiversity, land-use, and conservation to be reshaped to make it easier for innovative ideas like rewilding to be included.

However, the extent of global environmental change is now driving some ecosystems beyond their limits, meaning that for these systems restoration is no longer an option.

Rewilding provides a fresh perspective on the way forward for conservation in these situations, with its emphasis on minimal human interventions rather than sustained involvement, and focus on natural processes and functions.

In the face of the current loss of biodiversity, rewilding urgently needs to be added to our arsenal of solutions – but for this to happen, governments around the world need to revise existing legislation to facilitate its inclusion.

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The UK has lost almost all its native wildlife, especially its forests and big animals. Rewilding would bring back everything from beavers to bears.

Britain once looked very different. In place of sheep-strewn fields and treeless uplands, there were vast natural forests, glades and wild spaces. Within them, wolves, bears and lynx roamed the land. The first Britons lived alongside woolly mammoths, great auks and wild cows called aurochs.

All that is now gone. Humans chopped down the trees to make space for farms, and hunted the large animals to extinction, leaving plant-eaters to decimate the country’s flora. Britain is now one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t have top predators.

No matter how much we may think England’s green and pleasant countryside is “natural”, it is a pale shadow of what once was – and what could be again.

If some conservationists have their way, parts of the UK could be restored to a truly wild state. This “rewilding” would bring back animals and plants that have been lost, and allow them to roam freely. In these new wild spaces, people could reconnect with animals and plants in a way no park or zoo could ever manage. But it’s also a hugely controversial idea.

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