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The Knepp Wilding PodcastAuthor: Knepp.co.uk
Join Knepp co-owner Isabella Tree and experience some of the wildlife wonders encountered, the secrets uncovered and the remarkable people who are part of the Knepp Wilding project. Language: en-gb Genres: Natural Sciences, Nature, Science Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Graze Expectations – how Knepp’s animals capture carbon
Episode 47
Monday, 6 April, 2026
For many people, rewilding is a one-trick pony – it’s great for restoring nature and wildlife, but does it do anything for climate change?In this episode, Isabella asks her daughter Nancy Burrell about her doctorate research at Knepp and the astonishing findings that are changing how rewilding is valued as a mechanism for storing carbon.Join them as they wander through the scrubland at Knepp, visiting the sites where Nancy and her team excavated 270 trees, roots and all, to measure how much carbon they contained – a massive undertaking, producing the biggest dataset ever used for this kind of research. The browsing of our animals on hawthorn, blackthorn, dogrose, sallow and oak saplings, Nancy found, stimulates the growth of roots underground, as well as regrowth aboveground – storing 4x more carbon than was previously thought.This has huge implications for how projects that aim to capture carbon are funded in the future. Should we planting trees – the default mechanism currently used to fight climate change which, however, does not produce good results for wildlife and is often environmentally destructive? Or should we be encouraging the natural regeneration of trees and shrubs, with animals to browse them – rewilding projects, essentially – which captures huge amounts of carbon and provides wonderful habitat for wildlife at the same time?Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024.Send us a message or leave a commentFind out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
