From London’s beavers to leopard frogs in Las Vegas, here’s why we need to rewild our cities

By Euronews Green

Published on 27/05/2025 - 16:40 GMT+2

When we deliberation of rewilding cities, we usually deliberation of adding much greenery. Two-thirds of municipality conservation programmes do attraction exclusively connected vegetation, according to a caller reappraisal of thousands of technological papers, but there’s different broadside to this story. 

From beavers backmost swimming successful London’s rivers aft 400 years, to falcons nesting successful American high-rises, location are besides an expanding number of successful projects returning animals to cities. 

A caller study from nan University of Sydney illustrates nan benefits of these rewilding projects for city-dwellers arsenic good arsenic world biodiversity.

“They reconnect group pinch quality - an antidote to what researchers telephone quality shortage disorder,” says Dr Patrick Finnerty from nan University’s Faculty of Science, lead writer of nan world lit reappraisal published Sunday successful nan diary Bioscience.  

“In today’s municipality environments, galore children tin sanction hundreds of brands but often not a azygous autochthonal vertebrate aliases mammal.

“Bringing wildlife backmost into regular life improves mental health, fosters biology stewardship, and reminds america that quality isn't thing ‘out there’,” he adds.

Species are regaining a foothold successful cities

Of nan 2,800 technological papers that Dr Finnerty and his squad reviewed - connected reintroducing type to areas wherever they erstwhile thrived - less than 1 per cent progressive returning terrestrial animals to cities.

Animal rewilding tends to hap acold from municipality landscapes, contempt biodiversity nonaccomplishment being truthful pronounced successful cities. 

Other occurrence stories see leopard frogs being restored to Las Vegas, howler monkeys breeding successful Rio de Janeiro, and nan reintroduction of nan oriental pied hornbill to its humanities scope successful Singapore.

In Australia, platypus populations are now increasing connected Sydney’s periphery.

What are nan benefits of rewilding cities?

By 2050, astir 70 per cent of nan world’s organization of 10 cardinal group is expected to unrecorded successful municipality areas - a 20 per cent summation from today. This will necessitate a accelerated maturation of land-use change, particularly successful Africa and Asia. 

To extremity municipality sprawl steamrolling complete natural habitats, nan researchers are calling for municipality rewilding to beryllium a cardinal portion of broader ecological restoration initiatives.

The authors opportunity successful municipality rewilding requires observant planning, organization involvement, and addressing nan threats that caused section extinctions successful nan first place. 

For example, nan caller reintroduction of mini mammals, including nan eastbound pygmy possum, into an municipality bushland reserve bordering lodging successful Sydney required superior invasive predator power efforts to thief guarantee nan project’s success. 

"By integrating wildlife into municipality landscapes, we person a unsocial opportunity to style healthier and much resilient cities for early generations," says Dr Finnerty.