Rewilding: a Powerful Climate Solution for South-East Asia

This webinar focuses on the connection between rewilding, biodiversity recovery, and climate mitigation in South-East Asia, and it offers several concrete mechanisms that make it useful for practitioners. The discussion explains that healthy ecosystems with intact animal populations can store significantly more carbon than degraded systems, because animals shape vegetation structure, nutrient flows, and ecological interactions. The webinar therefore treats wildlife return not as a symbolic conservation outcome, but as a functional driver of ecosystem performance and carbon storage.

A particularly practical part of the discussion is the attention to specific restoration actions. The speakers describe restoring ecosystem processes by allowing forests to grow old, accelerating recovery through veteranization, removing barriers and obsolete infrastructure, rewetting drained wetlands, and removing old dams. These examples are useful because they show that rewilding often depends on unblocking ecological processes rather than only planting trees or fencing off land. The webinar also mentions bringing back large herbivores and supporting the comeback of keystone species through coexistence measures or active reintroductions. That gives practitioners a concrete sense of how rewilding can be operationalized in working landscapes.

The webinar further explains why species matter for carbon outcomes. It argues that animals influence carbon storage by changing how vegetation is distributed and how ecosystems function, and it identifies carbon-cycle hotspots where returning wild animals may create the largest climate benefit. This is particularly relevant for restoration planning because it suggests a way to prioritize sites and interventions based on both biodiversity and climate value.

For anyone involved in regenerative landscape work, this webinar is useful as a bridge between theory and implementation. It does not just endorse rewilding in principle; it outlines several management interventions and the ecological rationale behind them. That makes it a practical source for programme design, climate-biodiversity framing, and cross-sector advocacy.