The Recovery Gap: Are we creating the conditions for nature to recover?

With support from the Gallifrey Foundation, Wild Legacy has been exploring this question through a technical body of work on ecological integrity and recovery.

The Recovery Gap is a 12–14-minute music-led audiovisual work translating Wild Legacy’s scientific evidence synthesis from contrasting landscapes and seascapes through an original musical score and imagery.

It invites us to look beyond individual actions, targets and reported progress to a more fundamental question: what is happening to the integrity, condition and recovery capacity of the wider ecological system?

The screening is followed by a cross-sector discussion with Jessica Fallon, founder of Wild Legacy and co-author of the IUCN Guidelines for Rewilding. We welcome people from science, conservation, policy, governance, business, finance and other relevant sectors who are willing to engage with the evidence, question assumptions and explore the enquiry with us.

Wild Legacy has identified candidate landscapes and seascapes where an evidence-led, collaborative enquiry can take place alongside existing initiatives. Led by Jessica Fallon and guided by Wild Legacy’s ecological recovery proposition, the enquiry invites the relevant scientific expertise and people with deep knowledge of these places to contribute to identifying what recovery requires, what enables or constrains it, and how interventions and wider pressures interact.

Emerging questions and findings will be brought back to relevant scientific and sectoral contributors for scrutiny and discussion, supporting learning and adjustments over time and informing what may need to change in practice, governance and finance.

At COP17, the invitation is to engage with the proposition and help make this enquiry possible. We are seeking relevant expertise, contact points and feedback routes, alongside partnerships and funding to carry the work forward.

Screening: 12–14 minutes | Followed by discussion

Convened by Wild Legacy, with support from the Gallifrey Foundation.

See the work. Explore the question. Help take the enquiry forward.