Welcome to the second Brown Bag Seminar of 2026, with Oscar Hartman Davies, KTH, who will share about the work of Youngwilders, a non-profit organisation he co-founded with a group of friends, with the aim to accelerate nature recovery in the UK. Oscar will share how Youngwilders have involved young people centrally in the nature recovery agenda, presenting some of their projects and lessons learned along the way. Oscar will also discuss opportunities and challenges related to translating a Youngwilders-style approach to other contexts, such as in Sweden.
Nature recovery is a rapidly developing area of practice and policy which aims not only to halt biodiversity loss but also to improve the declining state of biodiversity in many areas. The European Commission’s Nature Restoration Law and the UK Nature Recovery Network evidence growing (although uneven and contested) political commitment to these aims.
However, many questions remain: Who will do the work of recovering nature? Who will this benefit? How can nature recovery initiatives support social, cultural, and economic life in the landscapes where they take place? Often, we hear that young people are ‘the future’ when it comes to biodiversity and the climate, but they are not always well represented in decisions made about these domains. Where specialist expertise, financial resources, and control over land strongly shape decisions about nature, opportunities for young people without these things to get involved can seem limited.
In this seminar, Oscar Hartman Davies will talk about the work of Youngwilders, a non-profit organisation aiming to accelerate nature recovery in the UK and involve young people centrally in the nature recovery agenda. Youngwilders began from a group of friends without much expertise, money, or any land, wanting to get involved in nature recovery. Starting from this half-baked idea, they now (sort of) know what they’re doing and manage 8 active nature recovery projects, run two annual Youth Rewilding Summits, and coordinate activities ranging from year-long traineeships, ecological skills weekends, and artist residencies. In the seminar, Oscar will present some of these projects and lessons learned along the way, and discuss opportunities and challenges related to translating a Youngwilders-style approach to other contexts, for example in Sweden.
Oscar Hartman Davies is an environmental geographer whose research critically and creatively appraises the growing use of digital technologies and data-driven approaches in different realms of environmental governance, from conservation, nature recovery, and land use planning, to the governance of large commercial fisheries and marine protected area management. Oscar has held visiting positions with research institutions and science-policy-practice initiatives across the Nordic countries and Japan and enjoys working across different disciplines and communities. As a member of the
Digital Ecologies Research Group
he has helped to establish the interdisciplinary field of digital ecologies, which focuses on the digital mediation and governance of more-than-human life. Oscar also has a background in the environmental non-profit sector, as a co-founder of
Youngwilders
, a youth-led nature recovery organisation which accelerates nature recovery in the UK and centres young people in the process and movement.
