Experts suggest that well-structured rewilding, which emphasizes the restoration of functioning ecosystems, can make landscapes more resistant to fires while also making them wetter and patchier.
While fires are a natural occurrence in some ecosystems, almost all wildfires in the UK are started by humans. The disastrous impact of these fires is largely dependent on the landscapes they blaze through. This underscores the importance of a wildfire policy that doesn’t solely focus on preventing ignitions but also integrates the restoration of landscapes that resist fires.
Rewilding is often misunderstood as a wildfire problem due to the accumulation of vegetation when grazing, cutting, or burning is stopped, consequently leading to more fuel for fires. However, this is only a part of the larger picture. When rewilding is carefully planned with a focus on restoring functioning ecosystems, it makes landscapes wetter, patchier, and more fire resistant.
The seemingly timeless and wild treeless moors found across Britain’s uplands have in fact been shaped by clearance, drainage, grazing, pollution, and burning. Peat records reveal that these landscapes were much wetter for most of the past 1,000 years, with abundant peat-forming Sphagnum moss, rather than today’s extensive heather-dominated vegetation created through rotational burning. This change, a relatively recent occurrence over the past 150 years or so, has made the uplands increasingly fire prone. Studies show that nearly 80% of England’s peatlands are dry and degraded, while only 1% is dominated by water-retaining species such as Sphagnum mosses.
How to rebuild nature’s fire defences
Rewilding should not be seen as land abandonment; instead, it requires carefully considered action to restore natural processes and functions. It involves learning from the complex habitat mosaics that once characterized Britain’s uplands, while preparing them for a future climate with no historical equivalent. The goal is to manage short-term transition risks while allowing ecosystems to reorganize into functional, climate-resilient states. Here are a few solutions:
1. Bring back the bog
Fire-prone landscapes need to be made wetter by blocking drains, covering bare peat, and restoring Sphagnum to keep water in the ground and reduce deep peat combustion. Studies show that rewetting and moss restoration can reduce the risk of deep, carbon-rich peat catching fire. However, choosing the right species for the right places under future climates is critical.
2. Restore wet riverscapes and ponds
Upland headwaters and valleys have been drained and straightened, speeding water out of these landscapes. The science suggests that re-meandering streams, reconnecting floodplains, and recovering wetlands can act as firebreaks. In the North York Moors, for example, six beaver dams increased water storage and dry-weather flows. In addition, ponds can reduce the spread of fires and provide water for wetting firebreaks and suppressing spot fires.
3. Bring back missing giants
Large herbivores like cattle, horses, deer, and bison create patchier vegetation by grazing, browsing, and trampling in different ways. This creates a landscape with natural breaks that slow the spread of fire. However, the diverse communities of large herbivores that once shaped Britain’s uplands have been replaced by managed livestock, which leads to the creation of dense and fire-prone vegetation when the animals aren’t grazing.
4. Recover broadleaf woodland
Evidence from Spain shows that broadleaf woodland had the lowest ignition risk, while pine and shrublands were among the most fire-prone habitats. Even under extreme fire weather modelling, broadleaf woodland reduced fire intensity fivefold. Unfortunately, Britain has lost the vast majority of its native woodlands. Today, only 14% of the UK is wooded, and about half of that is coniferous woodland – mostly in managed plantations. Therefore, it’s time that these woods were restored to the parts of the British uplands they once covered.
5. Rewild with people
Rewilding must include support from communities learning to coexist with more unpredictable landscapes. In the short term, prevention, intensified monitoring, early detection, and professional response must manage the risks of transition. Better warnings, rapid reporting, and early detection can make visitors and residents part of the defence. Britain won’t prevent every wildfire, but it can do something about the sorts of landscapes those fires burn through. Climate-smart rewilding should be treated as national resilience infrastructure: restoring bogs, rivers, woodlands and wild animals, so fires are less likely to become landscape-scale disasters.
