Rewilding is bold and ambitious, but it is also practical. There are different factors that affect which barriers can be removed, and in what order. Some of these factors are below. .

Prevention first

You learned earlier that infrastructure such as dams, canals, roads, and railways can harm nature and prevent natural processes from functioning as they should. It's important that these barriers to let nature recover and heal itself are removed, where possible.

It's also important that we look to the future and see what opportunities lie ahead. A recent report commissioned by WWF estimates that European countries are using between EUR 34 billion and EUR 48 billion in subsidies each year in ways that may damage the environment, including new infrastructure (Vandermaesen et al., 2024). To support recovery of nature, new infrastructure must be designed to allow wildlife, seeds and natural processes to continue.

Removing barriers that already exist

When it comes to taking opportunities to remove barriers in a landscape or seascape, a range of factors must be taken into account. These include:

• Permanence

  How reversible or removable are the barriers? Can they be modified? Drainage channels for wetlands can be blocked, while roads can be modified by slowing traffic and building wildlife bridges.

• Timescales

  Some barriers take days to remove, such as taking out obsolete fencing on private land. Others take years or decades, such as securing permission to remove a large dam or removing dykes to reconnect a river to its floodplain.

• Timing

  It may be optimal to remove some barriers at certain times of year, bearing in mind things like species migration or reproduction periods, or characteristics of different seasons.

• Legality

  Removing an obsolete dam may require environmental and social impact assessments and permits.

• People

  Europe is highly populated and not everyone shares our nature-rich vision of the future. While some may find the removal of a barrier immediately acceptable, others will take more time to understand and agree to it. This is why helping people to benefit from the recovery of natural processes and wildlife populations is so important, as it amplifies the scale of what can be done.