After more than a millennium of farming, logging, paving over and settling, Europe appears to be one of the least wild continents on Earth.
But look again: new research shows that nearly a quarter of this densely populated area is intact enough to support the key herbivores and carnivores that characterize functional wild ecosystems. From the Arctic tundra of Norway to the Sierra Nevada mountains of southern Spain, vast tracts of land with little human presence have the potential to achieve biodiversity goals by restoring wildlife, a process sometimes called “rewilding.”
“Europe has many areas with a light human footprint that are home to important animal species and have the potential to re-rewild,” says Miguel Araújo, a biogeographer at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences and the University of Évora in Portugal.
Europe, like much of the world, has set an ambitious target of protecting 30 percent of its land area by 2030 to counter habitat destruction, which is at the heart of the global decline of wildlife.
Araujo and his colleagues from the University of Évora wanted to know how much and where European land showed signs of boasting healthy wild ecosystems that could achieve these goals. To do so, they scoured maps of Europe to find places that met three key criteria: Less than 5 percent of the land area was covered by human footprints like houses and roads; The land area was densely populated over an area of more than 100 square kilometers; and It was already home to important herbivores or carnivores, or had the potential to house those animals if they were reintroduced.
Scientists reported last week in the journal Current Biology that about 1.2 million square kilometres of land in Europe meets these criteria – an area larger than the combined land area of France and Spain.
Many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, are in remote locations with cold temperatures or high altitudes — conditions that make it difficult for people to farm or live in them. Most of Scandinavia, the northern Scottish highlands, and the mountains of Spain offer the most promising terrains: more than 1,000 square kilometers of land that are largely uninhabited and already home to important species.
Although less than ideal, there are many locations with smaller landscapes that could meet the researchers' requirements, including large parts of Spain and Portugal, southern France, the Balkans and south-eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and again Scandinavia.
Combined, that land represents about 25 percent of Europe. But that doesn't mean the continent is already on track to reach its goal: Some places have fewer important species than the natural populations estimated in the study. And nearly three-quarters of the land lies outside currently protected areas, the scientists found.
Eleven countries, including Scandinavia, the Baltic states, France, Spain and the UK, could achieve their conservation goals by designating parts of their land for protection.
But the scientists concluded that in many European countries, conservation goals will not be achieved by simply stepping back and letting nature take its course – this is especially true in densely populated central and southern Europe, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Hungary.
There, people will need to get more creative, the researchers said. That could mean restoring old mines or other land to make it wildlife-friendly, creating connected networks of small protected areas, or finding ways to manage farmland and forests so harvests work more in harmony with wildlife.
Either way, there's an urgency to move forward, and not just because of the political deadline of 2030. Even the seemingly best habitats for wildlife are being altered by forces such as climate change. In Scandinavia, for example, warmer winters are creating new dangers for reindeer, as storms cover snow with a layer of ice, preventing the animals from accessing the plants they feed on.
“We are in a race against time,” Araujo says, “and the areas that seem most promising for rewilding today may not be the same in 50 years' time because of the effects of climate change.”
Araújo et al., “Expanding European protected areas through rewilding,” Current Biology, August 15, 2024.
Image: Photo by Joe Green on Unsplash
