To capitalise on the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, we need institutional redesign to empower advances in restoration ecology and rewilding

Abstract

Abstract The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration signifies the ambition to move beyond a defensive focus on biodiversity protection towards a proactive agenda of restoring ecosystems to generate value for people and nature. The international nature regime, based on the linked concepts of biodiversity and sustainable development, has achieved much. However, its institutions are built on a ‘compositional’ approach to ecology that ‘locks in’ arbitrary ecological baselines and constrains an ambitious approach to ecosystem restoration. Rewilding and the wider field of restoration ecology foreground the dynamic nature of ecosystems, the need to consider system function and the importance of trophic networks for ecosystem recovery. Rewilding science extends these new directions with a focus on restoring the functional effects of large megafauna and random biotic and abiotic disturbance. I argue that historic processes of institutional reductionism, which enabled the construction of a strong protective biodiversity regime, have created institutions that lack the flexibility and innovation culture needed to create new policy and practice to support the recovery of ecosystem integrity and open‐ended restoration processes such as rewilding. Given this, we need to initiate ordered and effective processes of institutional redesign. To this end, I have proposed five actions for discussion, namely: (a) adopt and embed a positive, hopeful and empowering narrative of nature recovery; (b) create ‘nature recovery innovation zones’, where existing policy and regulations are relaxed and new approaches are developed and tested; (c) develop functional classifications of nature to support the design of ‘new generation’ policy instruments; (d) create markets for ecosystem recovery based on units of ecosystem change to support the emergence of a nature recovery land economy; and (e) introduce programs of professional training in the science, principles and opportunities of ecosystem recovery at all levels in government and non‐government conservation agencies. The world of 2050 will be very different from that of today. We have extremely well‐educated and skilled younger generations, with the motivation and ability to redesign nature institutions. It is time to act and empower them. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.