wildE events
How does rewilding affect the recreational value of natural areas?
How does rewilding affect the value of natural areas in economic terms?
How does rewilding affect recreation and the value people get from being in nature?
Join our next webinar in the Green Shoots series, where Tim de Kruiff and Jette Bredahl Jacobsen will discuss the impacts rewilding can have on recreation and nature value.
Using their own work from Denmark and presenting insights from the field of environmental valuation in general, Tim and Jette will take us on an economic journey through rewilding. In their work, they look at the potential impacts of rewilding and nature management on the recreational and broader societal value of natural areas.
The wildE consortium brings together researchers from many different academic fields. In the next few webinars, we’ll be departing from the field of ecology and moving towards economics and social sciences. Where does rewilding fit into these fields? What sorts of issues do they deal with?
Join us on 4 June to learn more!
About the speakers
Tim de Kruiff is a PhD-student at the department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. His research primarily focuses on the valuation of rewilding benefits. He looks at the impact of different possible choices in management of natural areas, and how this affects people’s willingness to pay for nature. Working closely together with the ecologists, ethicists and sociologists in the consortium, his research aims to build an understanding of people’s preferences and trade-offs in relation to rewilding.
Jette Bredahl Jacobsen is a professor in environmental and resource economics at the department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. She teaches and does research on a broad range of topics within this field, in particular environmental valuation, forest economics, climate economics. In particular, she looks at the valuation of non-use values (e.g. biodiversity) and decision making where risk and uncertainty plays a central role. She is the current vice chair for the European Advisory Board for Climate Change and a special advisor in the Danish Environmental Economic Council.
Green Shoots: Between chainsaws and conservation: Safeguarding the pristine wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains
Currently, most European forest landscapes are intensively managed, leading to the disappearance of the most pristine wilderness, such as primary and natural forests, with strong negative impacts on biodiversity. Although natural disturbances play a critical role in maintaining multiple taxonomic groups and species across large landscapes, the low acceptance of these disturbances as part of natural dynamics and rewilding tools is a key driver of the legal loss of primary forests and wilderness in Eastern Europe.
Despite the relatively small total area of these valuable ecosystems, they are directly endangered - especially by salvage logging. Road construction has increased accessibility to mountain wilderness areas that were largely protected for centuries due to their inaccessibility.
At wildE’s Green shoots webinar on 9 January 2024, we heard from Martin Mikoláš and Rhiannon Gloor, from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. They discussed safeguarding the pristine wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains in the context of new research on the ineffectiveness of protected area management in Europe. This example and new extensive study underscores the importance of conservation strategies to halt the rapid disappearance of the last of temperate Europe’s primary forests and their unique biodiversity.
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Watch the recording below
Green Shoots: how large wildlife can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation
Despite representing a very small fraction of the living biomass on Planet Earth, large wildlife species have an incredible impact on ecosystems. We are living in an increasingly defaunated planet, where large wildlife species are vanishing from our world, and subsequently the critical role they play in the regulation of ecosystems and the services these provide to sustain human societies.
In this talk, post-doctoral researcher Nacho Villar from the NIOO-KNAW Netherlands Institute for Ecology presented alongside professor in Rewilding Ecology Liesbeth Bakker.
Having gained new insights from studying wildlife and ecosystem interactions in the tropical forests of Brazil, Nacho is now back in Europe producing new, cutting-edge research on rewilding. Liesbeth is Europe’s first professor of rewilding and studies rewilding as a novel ecosystem restoration technique at the NIOO-KNAW Netherlands Institute for Ecology.
Nacho and Liesbeth discussed how large wildlife can help us to fight against climate change in different regions of the world, from tropical forests to tundra ecosystems, discussing the current state-of-the-art about some ecological processes through which large wildlife can contribute towards climate change mitigation and adaptation.
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Watch the recording below