Ocean ecosystems are under extreme stress on several fronts including overfishing, ocean acidification, climate change and marine warming. While ocean conservation efforts often tend to focus on creating marine protected areas, researchers recently stressed the need to move beyond protection toward active recovery using a different approach: Marine rewilding.
In a new perspective paper, the researchers laid out eight key principles that can guide such rewilding.
The concept of “rewilding” is usually applied to terrestrial ecosystems, where the goal is to restore ecological processes and create resilient, self-sustaining ecosystems with minimal human interventions.
Gavin Stark, a post-doctoral researcher with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, and his colleagues, write that one important principle of marine rewilding is that people can’t simply be fenced out of the process.
“You cannot really separate people from the rewilding process inside the marine ecosystems,” Stark told Mongabay in a video call.
