The economic case for rewilding

Every functioning ecosystem delivers services that would otherwise cost money to replicate artificially — or simply cannot be replicated at all. Economists call these ecosystem services, and they include:

• Flood and drought regulation — forests, wetlands, and floodplains buffer extreme weather events, reducing damage to property and infrastructure.
• Carbon sequestration — intact peatlands, forests, and seagrass meadows store carbon, providing measurable climate value.
• Water filtration — intact riparian zones and wetlands filter pollutants before they reach drinking water sources, reducing treatment costs.
• Pollination — wild pollinators support approximately 75% of global food crops (FAO, 2018), a service with enormous agricultural economic value.
• Recreation and tourism — wild landscapes attract visitors, generating income and employment in rural communities.

These services have historically been treated as free. Rewilding makes the case that investing in their restoration is economically rational, not just ecologically important. Nature, it turns out, is infrastructure.

The most immediately quantifiable economic benefit of rewilding is ecotourism. Charismatic wildlife and restored landscapes attract visitors who spend money on accommodation, guiding, food, and transport — generating income that flows directly to rural and gateway communities.

Yellowstone, USA

Source: Rewilding Academy, citing National Park Service visitor spending data, 2024. rewilding.academy →

Wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone in 1995 is widely credited with boosting wildlife tourism. A University of Montana study estimated that wolf-centred ecotourism alone generated more than $35.5 million per year in gateway communities within a decade of reintroduction (confidence interval: $22.4–$48.6 million).

Source: University of Montana Regional Economic Impact Analysis, cited in Defenders of Wildlife and Natural Habitat Adventures (2022).

Knepp Estate, England

Knepp Estate in West Sussex was unprofitable farmland before its owners began rewilding in 2001. Two decades later, Knepp's nature tourism business — comprising wild safaris, camping, glamping, and a shop — now generates around £800,000 in annual turnover, with a 22% profit margin (£190,000).

Benchmarked against comparable rural estates using Savills data, Knepp has consistently outperformed the average English rural estate on profit per hectare, as well as the regional average for southeast England.

Source: Rewilding Britain case study on Knepp Estate. rewildingbritain.org.uk →

Global ecotourism market

The global ecotourism market was valued at approximately $270 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow significantly over the coming decade. Rewilding projects that restore large mammals and intact ecosystems are increasingly positioned as wildlife tourism destinations capable of capturing a share of this market.

"With a camera you can shoot a brown bear thousands of times, but with a bullet it's only one time and the animal is gone."

— Nino Salkic, A New Path for the Velebit Mountains, Rewilding Velebit, 2024

Natural flood management — restoring wetlands, floodplains, and riparian vegetation — is consistently cheaper than hard engineering solutions such as flood walls and drainage infrastructure, while delivering additional ecological and recreational benefits.

• During Hurricane Irma, mangroves along Florida's coast averted an estimated $1.5 billion in surge-related flood damage, representing a 25% saving in counties with intact mangrove coverage.
• A PLoS One study found that nature-based solutions including wetland and oyster reef restoration could prevent up to $50 billion in projected flood losses along Florida's coast over a decade, with a benefit-to-cost ratio above 3.5.
• Massachusetts' Division of Ecological Restoration found that for every $1 million spent on restoration, projects generate a 75% return on investment and create or maintain 12.5 full-time-equivalent jobs — comparable to road and bridge construction.

Source: Nature4Climate, Ecosystem Services and Green Infrastructure, citing PLoS One (2017), Narayan et al., and Massachusetts DER data. nature4climate.org →

Beavers as natural flood engineers

Beaver reintroduction is increasingly recognised as a cost-effective natural flood management tool. Beaver dams slow water movement, raise water tables, and increase floodplain retention. Several UK projects are now quantifying the flood risk reduction value of beaver activity, with early results showing significant downstream benefits.

Carbon markets and climate finance

Restored ecosystems — particularly peatlands, wetlands, forests, and seagrass meadows — are significant carbon sinks. As carbon markets develop, the ability to generate and sell verified carbon credits is becoming a new revenue stream for rewilding projects.

In 2024, Denmark became the first country in the world to introduce a carbon tax on agricultural emissions, using the revenue to fund nature restoration. Agricultural lands are being taken out of production to allow peatlands, river valleys, and bogs to recover — creating a direct economic mechanism that rewards rewilding.

Source: OLCreate/Open University, The Economic Opportunity of Rewilding module, citing Danish government policy announcement 2024.

Wetland mitigation banking in the United States — a system where developers offset wetland destruction by purchasing credits from third-party restorers — is a well-established market that grew directly from rewilding-adjacent policies under the Clean Water Act. It represents one of the most mature examples of financial markets built around ecological restoration.

Rural employment and community resilience

Rewilding projects create employment in land management, guiding, hospitality, ecological monitoring, and restoration work. In rural areas facing agricultural decline, they offer an alternative economic model that can support communities without requiring continued subsidy of unproductive farmland.

A 2024 peer-reviewed systematic review in Ambio — the most comprehensive economic analysis of rewilding literature to date — found that rewilding studies most frequently document positive economic impacts on tourism and employment, while noting that robust monetary quantification of these impacts remains limited and that more rigorous economic research is needed.

Source: Faure, E., Levrel, H. & Quétier, F. (2024). Economics of rewilding. Ambio, 53, 1367–1382. doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-02019-2 →

The Knepp Estate model illustrates this well. Beyond its direct ecotourism revenue, the estate reports wider economic benefits to local businesses including pubs, shops, and bed-and-breakfasts from increased visitor numbers. The estate also runs education, wellness, and volunteer programmes that bring additional income and community engagement.

It is important to be honest about the state of the evidence. The 2024 Ambio systematic review, which analysed 257 peer-reviewed references, found that:

• The economic dimensions of rewilding remain understudied relative to the ecological literature.
• Most studies document positive economic impacts qualitatively, but few properly quantify them with robust monetary assessments.
• There are real economic trade-offs: rewilding can reduce income from conventional agriculture, alter landscapes in ways that affect cultural heritage, and create costs for farmers dealing with reintroduced predators or herbivores.
• The economic case for rewilding is strongest when projects are designed to include ecotourism from the outset, when carbon and biodiversity credit markets are accessible, and when community benefit is built into the model.

The conclusion is that rewilding can be economically viable — and in many cases more profitable than the land use it replaces — but it requires investment, planning, and time before returns materialise.