Developing NbS scaling approaches to achieve just transformative change – FairNature

FairNature’s mission is to develop a vital understanding of the justice challenges around nature-based solutions (NbS) and identify key requirements for scaling NbS to foster just transformative change. While NbS are of growing political relevance, they have to be implemented at tremendous scale to achieve their expected social, economic and ecological benefits. If not executed properly, scaling NbS can reinforce or amplify existing privileges and injustices in process and outcomes and hinder the potential for positive change for the sustainable use of biodiversity and other societal challenges. Yet there islimited evidence and real world cases exemplifying how NbS’ multiple transformative objectives can be achieved at scale while promoting justice.
FairNature will address these knowledge gaps and develop a practical FairNature Guide for the just and transformative scaling of NbS. The Guide is a key product of the project, emerging from the co-creation, testing and improvement of NbS scaling in six European action cases. Each was selected for the range of challenges and vulnerabilities to distributional, procedural and recognition injustices being faced and the different scales being addressed. The case diversity allows us to explore and provide novel insights about the conditions for the just and transformative scaling of NbS, which we hypothesise requires scaling up, scaling down, scaling out, scaling in and scaling deep to be designed and implemented based on justice principles.
In order to address this central hypothesis, we will create Reflexive Labs in all action cases. This will establish a cycle of observation, analysis, reflection and adjustment with, between and beyond the cases. Building on close collaboration with stakeholders in the action cases and beyond, the reflexive labs will systematise stakeholders’ needs and demands and form the backbone for developing our scientific framework and distilling practical recommendations and user-oriented products. Our conceptual and policy-oriented work will be backed by extensive empirical data collection in the cases. FairNature methodologies will be tailored to the action cases to analyse the plural values of nature and how they are taken into account in political decisions, trade-offs between justice outcomes and NbS objectives, as well as different governance arrangements, policies and financial strategies for NbS.
Our reflexive, stakeholder-centred project approach is explicitly designed to identify findings relevant for the action cases and wider audiences and to upscale these beyond FairNature. We will disseminate the project results - in particular the FairNature Guide - in local, national and international fora through our extensive science-policy-society involvements (e.g. in IPBES, ESP, the Horizon Europe NbS task forces, and several complementary Horizon Europe, Biodiversa+ and other projects) and through targeted publications, public and scientific communication activities.