The wolf is settling in 34 European countries, but no one has agreed on the rules

In ten years, the range of the gray wolf has expanded by 25% across the European continent. The species is now monitored in 34 countries. This return is not an ecological curiosity: it is a full-scale test of Europe’s capacity to manage a shared resource that no one asked to share.

The result, for now, looks less like an environmental policy success than a series of local conflicts that each country manages in its own way, with very unequal results. Bulgaria and the Italian Abruzzi have found equilibriums. France and Spain have not. The difference is not biological. It is political.

The essentials

  • The wolf’s range has expanded by 25% in ten years in Europe; the species is present in 34 countries according to the European Commission.
  • The EU downgraded the wolf’s protection status in December 2024, moving from “strictly protected” to “protected” under the Bern Convention, opening the way to easier culling.
  • Documented cohabitation models — livestock guardian dogs, compensation conditioned on preventive measures, zoning — work where they have been applied with rigor.
  • Political battles around the wolf’s status have so far prevented the large-scale implementation of these models, blocking what should be a technical debate about management tools.

34 countries, 20,000 wolves, zero common framework

The European Commission’s figures are clear: the wolf today occupies territories it had abandoned for a century. The lynx is following a comparable trajectory, with approximately 9,400 individuals recorded on the continent, 12% more than in 2016. The Rewilding Europe program, launched in 2011, now covers more than 10 million hectares spread across a dozen countries.

This return is not spontaneous. It is the direct result of the 1992 Habitats Directive, which placed the wolf under strict protection in the European Union, combined with massive agricultural abandonment in mountain zones and reduced hunting. Europe created the conditions for the wolf’s return without preparing the conditions for its cohabitation with humans living in the same spaces.

The result is predictable: wolf populations rebuilt their numbers where habitats allowed, that is to say precisely in rural and mountain zones where extensive livestock farming remains the main economic activity. The collision was inscribed in the logic of the system from the start.

Today, the European wolf population is estimated at approximately 20,000 individuals, according to consolidated data from the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe platform. This population is not homogeneous: it is dense in Romania, Poland, the Carpathians, central Italy, and Spain. It is expanding rapidly in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, countries that had not seen wolves for decades.

The 2024 downgrade: a political decision, not a scientific one

In December 2024, the Bern Convention formalized the wolf’s reclassification from Annex II (strictly protected species) to Annex III (protected species). The European Union followed, accordingly modifying its Habitats Directive. This decision now allows member states to authorize wolf culling more easily, without having to justify a “derogation” from the protection regime.

The European Commission justified this change by the “concentration of packs in certain regions of Europe” and the “serious problems” posed to rural communities. President von der Leyen, whose 30-year-old pony Dolly was killed by a wolf in Lower Saxony in September 2022, had personally advocated for this change starting in 2023.

The key point here is not that the decision is bad. It is that it was made under political pressure, without being based on a clearly defined alternative management model. The political problem of the image was resolved by modifying the legal framework, without resolving the practical problem of cohabitation. This is the reverse order of what should be done.

Scientists specializing in large carnivore management, particularly those gathered in the Commission’s expert group on large carnivores, did not contest that more flexible management tools could be useful. They contested that this flexibility be granted without binding constraints on preventive measures. Relaxing protection without requiring prevention amounts to managing the symptom without treating the cause.

The Abruzzi solved the question forty years ago

In 1921, the Abruzzo National Park, in central Italy, was created to protect the last Italian wolves, reduced to about twenty individuals. Today, the Italian wolf population exceeds 3,000 individuals, with several hundred living in areas of high density sheep and cattle farming.

The Abruzzi model rests on three pillars documented since the 1980s. First, the livestock guardian dog: the Abruzzese mastiff, or “pastore abruzzese,” is a protection tool whose efficacy is measured. Studies conducted by the WWF Italy organization and ISPRA (Superior Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) show that flocks protected by properly trained dogs experience 60 to 80% fewer attacks than unprotected flocks. The dog does not replace the wolf with another predator: it recomposes the balance by making flocks less vulnerable.

The second pillar is conditional compensation. Reimbursement for losses is not automatic: it is paid if and only if the herder can demonstrate that they have implemented the recommended preventive measures. This conditionality radically changes the incentive structure. The herder who refuses to deploy guardian dogs bears the risk themselves; the one who deploys them is covered. The system creates shared responsibility.

The third pillar is continuous scientific monitoring. Wolf populations are tracked, attacks documented, and the results of preventive measures evaluated. This database feeds management adjustments year after year.

Bulgaria applied similar logic in the Rhodope regions, with particular emphasis on restoring traditional livestock farming practices—notably the return to night-time enclosed sheepfolds, abandoned as operations modernized and labor costs increased.

These models are not perfect. They do not eliminate all losses. But they reduce them to a level that the herders concerned consider manageable, provided that compensation for residual losses is rapid and not bureaucratic.

Why France is not managing it

France is the most documented example of cohabitation that is dysfunctional despite available tools. The wolf returned naturally to the Mercantour in 1992. In 2024, the French population is estimated at approximately 1,000 individuals, distributed across about forty packs. Sheep losses attributed to wolves amount to approximately 12,000 animals per year according to figures from the Ministry of Ecological Transition, for a national sheep flock of 7 million head.

The ratio is on the order of 0.17%. It is not nothing for a herder whose flock is attacked. It is objectively low on a national scale. France spends approximately 40 million euros each year managing the wolf issue: compensations, subsidies for protective measures, authorized culling, scientific monitoring. That is a lot for a limited real impact.

The reason for this relative failure lies less in biology than in politics. The French debate on wolves has structured itself into two impermeable camps: herders and their union representatives, who demand strong population regulation, and nature conservation associations, who defend maximum species protection. These two camps rarely speak to each other, mistrust one another, and have succeeded in transforming a territorial management problem into a symbolic battle.

In this context, the tools that work in the Abruzzi are deployed chaotically in France. Guardian dogs exist, but their adoption remains partial and unequal depending on the departments and sectors. Compensation is paid without systematic conditioning on preventive measures, which reduces the incentive to protect oneself. And authorizations for culling, granted each year by the government after long and conflictual negotiations, satisfy neither the herders (who find them insufficient) nor the protectors (who find them excessive).

The result is permanent compromise that is not a satisfying compromise for anyone, and which does not resolve the structural problem. The fundamental question—at what wolf density can French territory live, and what preventive measures are mandatory to claim compensation—has never been resolved by a clear political decision.

This phenomenon is not unique to the wolf. The same mechanics are found in other environmental issues where political polarization prevents technical treatment of questions that have technical answers. The example of wild bees follows comparable logic: the data is available, solutions partially known, but implementation stumbles over organized interests.

Rewilding at 10 million hectares poses a question that no one is yet asking

The Rewilding Europe program crossed the threshold of 10 million hectares restored or in restoration in 2024. This is a measurable success, carried by a coalition of non-governmental organizations, local governments, and private landowners who have accepted modifying their land-use practices.

This program produces documented results: the return of bison populations in Romania, expansion of wetlands in Spain, natural reforestation in the Scottish highlands. It is financed in part by carbon and biodiversity offset mechanisms, which gives it an economic foundation beyond environmental philanthropy. It is a model that deserves close attention, as can be observed in other sectors where the economic valorization of a common good conditions its preservation—the question of raw materials and resource rents poses structurally similar challenges.

But large-scale rewilding raises a question that its promoters tend to evade: who decides, and who pays? In rural zones affected by the return of large predators, residents often feel that decisions are made about them without them. The wolf returns because European directives made it possible. It settles because habitats have been freed by economic dynamics—rural exodus, farming abandonment—over which local populations had no control. And now they are asked to cohabitate with a predator they did not choose, being offered compensations whose level and conditions are set elsewhere.

This asymmetry between those who benefit symbolically from the return of wild nature (the urban dwellers and European decision-makers) and those who bear the direct costs (herders and rural populations) is the main driver of conflict. It is not resolved by scientific arguments. It is resolved by explicit and equitable cost-sharing, and by genuine inclusion of local communities in decision-making.

Experiences in this direction exist. In the Bulgarian Rhodopes, herding associations were integrated from the start in designing protection programs. In Portugal, in the Douro region, territorial contracts between natural parks and agricultural operators have created positive incentives for cohabitation. These experiences are less visible than conflicts, because conflicts make headlines and quiet successes do not.

What the 2024 downgrade should have triggered

The December 2024 European decision was presented as a victory by agricultural organizations and as a capitulation by environmental organizations. Both readings are partial.

What this decision reveals is the absence of a European framework for adaptive large carnivore management. Such a framework would impose: population thresholds by geographic zone, mandatory preventive measures to benefit from compensations, graduated intervention protocols (hazing, targeted culling, demographic regulation) depending on the state of local cohabitation, and cost-sharing between European and national levels.

This framework does not exist. And the 2024 downgrade, by giving member states more latitude to act, did not fill this void: it transferred responsibility downward without providing the methodological tools to exercise it.

The likely result in the medium term: growing heterogeneity between member states, with some states aggressively reducing their wolf populations and others maintaining them, creating situations where wolves cross borders from protection zones into hunting zones. This is biologically absurd and legally complex.

The European Commission announced a new “Action Plan on Large Carnivores” for 2025. The details of this plan will be decisive. If it merely offers non-binding recommendations, it will not change much. If it conditions European funding on the adoption of verifiable cohabitation protocols, it can create the missing lever.

The question posed by the wolf’s return to 34 European countries is not whether the wolf has a place on the continent. The data shows it is settling there anyway. The question is whether Europe is capable of collectively managing a common good that knows no borders, and of making those who benefit symbolically from it pay to compensate those who bear the real costs. These are governance problems, not ecological ones.

Sources

  1. European Commission – Large carnivore populations across Europe: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/habitats-directive/large-carnivores/large-carnivore-populations-across-europe_en
  2. Rewilding Europe – results and annual reports: https://rewildingeurope.com
  3. Bern Convention – amendment on wolf status, December 2024: https://www.coe.int/en/web/bern-convention
  4. French Ministry of Ecological Transition – wolf annual report 2023-2024 (no link – internal ministry data accessible via the data.gouv.fr portal)
  5. Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe – population data: no stable URL link; results published in IUCN SSC annual reports
  6. ISPRA (Superior Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, Italy) – studies on guardian dog effectiveness: no stable URL link; publications available on the ISPRA portal
  7. OFB / loupfrance.fr – Wolf population estimate France 2024: https://www.loupfrance.fr/mise-a-jour-des-estimations-demographiques-et-des-effectifs-de-la-population-de-loups-en-france-lors-de-lhiver-2023-2024/
  8. Bern Convention / Pro Natura – Wolf status downgrade December 2024: https://www.pronatura.ch/fr/2024/commentaire-sur-le-declassement-du-statut-de-protection-du-loup-par-la-convention-de-berne
  9. EU Council – Final approval of Habitats Directive modification (June 2025): https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2025/06/05/habitats-directive-council-gives-final-approval-to-the-new-protection-status-of-wolves/
  10. Rewilding Europe – Official history: https://rewildingeurope.com/history/
  11. European Commission – von der Leyen press release September 2023: https://luxembourg.representation.ec.europa.eu/actualites-et-evenements/actualites/loups-en-europe-la-commission-invite-les-autorites-locales-utiliser-pleinement-les-derogations-2023-09-04_fr
  12. ASPAS – Sheep losses and flock percentage: https://www.aspas-nature.org/la-france-continue-de-tuer-inutilement-des-loups-en-grand-nombre/
  13. von der Leyen’s pony – multiple convergent sources: https://www.agriculture-dromoise.fr/articles/08/09/2022/Allemagne-le-poney-d-Ursula-von-der-Leyen-tue-par-un-loup-88901/