Presentation short abstract

Global seaweed aquaculture's rise as a flagship NbS is marked by a strategic concentration of industrial production in China/Indonesia. We interrogate the justice implications of this model, asking if it marginalizes community-centered, ecologically diverse pathways to coastal futures.

Presentation long abstract

Global seaweed aquaculture has surged, rising from 6.58 million tonnes in 1992 to 35.14 million tonnes in 2022, and is increasingly framed as a flagship Nature-Based Solution (NbS) for food security and climate mitigation. Drawing on a three-decade analysis of FAO data, this presentation critically interrogates this dominant “blue growth” narrative through a political ecology lens.

Our analysis reveals a profound socio-ecological transformation: a marked shift from diverse, often food-oriented species to industrial monocultures of red seaweeds cultivated for global commodity chains. This shift is geographically concentrated, with China and Indonesia now dominating 86% of global production. While representing a strategic harnessing of marine potential, this concentration of power raises critical questions about value capture and ecological distributive justice.

We argue the prevailing NbS narrative obscures the model's asymmetrical burdens. The expansion of large-scale, export-oriented production can reinforce socio-spatial inequalities, marginalize small-scale fishers, and prioritize commodity extraction over local food sovereignty and ecological resilience. Through this case, we explore the tensions between techno-managerial NbS frameworks and the principles of “nature-inspired justice.” We ask: Can seaweed aquaculture be re-imagined through decolonial, feminist, and redistributional principles to foster genuinely equitable and ecologically attuned coastal futures? This research grounds critiques of NbS in the political economy of a rapidly globalizing marine resource, contributing to debates on just transitions.

Presentation short abstract

Our work draws together queer ecology, plant biology and social science approaches to advance community-led biodiversity planting and imagine what nature corridors built from community justice might look like. We reflect on working collaboratively with a community organisation in times of crisis.

Presentation long abstract

There are real opportunities across cities (especially those like Glasgow with high concentrations of community gardens and parks) to build nature corridors into the fabric of the city, providing pathways for pollinators and supporting the full ecological life of the city in the face of pollinator decline. But how such work can interface with growing social schisms, threats of gentrification, austerity and concatenating crises, aptly termed the ‘long emergency’ (Greenfield, 2024), remains a difficult question.

Our work draws together queer ecology, plant biology and social science approaches to advance community-led biodiversity planting and imagine what nature corridors built from community justice might look like. Working with a politically-active community arts organisation in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Glasgow with a community garden, we piloted a series of community-widening workshops based around pollinator education, citizen science and urban belonging to experimentally connect community social science and nature conservation, with an eye to producing planting arrays and exploring ideas about nature belonging.

Emerging findings from the project suggest that it is hard to get beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of environmental projects, despite being rooted in an organisation with a broad catchment. It also suggests that while nature-belonging is increasingly central to left-wing ideologies; it is also being crowded out louder crises. In this context, we suggest a very careful grounding in participatory practice is required; allowing the science to follow the community organising and be responsive to local priorities, in order to build climate justice into nature corridors.

Presentation short abstract

Implementers of NbS often ignore the root causes of the socioecological issues that NbS aim to solve. To address this, we analyzed the limitations of mainstream NbS and propose transformation through Critical NbS, addressing socioecological issues from DFPE towards environmental and climate justice.

Presentation long abstract

This paper develops the framework “critical Nature-based Solutions” (NbS) to advance just environmental actions based on the situated and embodied experiences of local actors who steward vital social-ecological systems through their everyday practices. We combine insights from ongoing collaborative research with Afro-descendant women who steward mangroves on Colombia’s Pacific Coast with a critical literature review of mainstream NbS approaches. By identifying the theoretical, conceptual, and practical limitations of mainstream NbS and highlighting alternative pathways enacted in Colombia, we advance a decolonial feminist political ecology approach to advocate for critical NbS.

Mainstream NbS approaches promise to protect ecosystems and address social challenges simultaneously, showing success in diverse contexts, including environmental peacebuilding, food security, and local governance. However, examining their implementation reveals critical blind spots. Our review shows that mainstream approaches systematically overlook power relations, colonial legacies, and gendered dimensions, essential to understanding the socioecological issues that NbS protagonists claim to solve. Hence, by pursuing apolitical and universalist strategies, current NbS often reproduce the problems they seek to address—including knowledge erasure, environmental degradation, maladaptation, greenwashing, and land grabbing.

We argue that critical NbS moves beyond technocratic solutions by challenging the apolitical, universalist, and deterministic assumptions underlying mainstream approaches. Rather than abandoning NbS entirely, our framework harnesses their potential while embedding transformative and critical dimensions. This ensures that interventions advance environmental and climate justice rather than perpetuating historical injustices. By making power and politics visible, critical NbS offer a pathway toward transformative socioecological solutions that address both symptoms and causes of environmental challenges.

Presentation short abstract

Urban NbS are often evaluated through anthropocentric, valuation-driven metrics that obscure ecological losses and reinforce uneven ecological exchange. Drawing on Scottish cases, this study proposes an eco-centric assessment framework to foreground ecosystem integrity and multispecies justice.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based Solutions are widely promoted in European cities as win–win interventions for climate resilience, liveability and economic competitiveness. Yet dominant assessment approaches remain anchored in anthropocentric logics and natural-capital accounting, privileging human benefits and financial returns over ecological integrity. This study argues that such metric regimes actively contribute to uneven ecological exchange, rendering biosphere degradation, non-human losses and long-term ecosystem risks invisible within urban decision-making.Existing NbS evaluation tools largely emphasis efficiency, performance and monetary valuation, tracking co-benefits such as health, amenity or avoided damage, while their ability to reshape planning toward ecocentric priorities remains limited. Although impact handbooks and standards promote quality and replicability, even newer frameworks struggle to support integrated ecological assessment or to move beyond human-centered ecosystem-services models. Empirical research with NbS practitioners and policymakers in Scottish cities (29 interviews) shows how these limitations materialist in practice: high-profile projects are predominantly framed around flood protection, property and infrastructure security, land-value uplift and recreation, with biodiversity and ecosystem health treated as secondary co-benefits.Only a small subset of initiatives takes an explicitly eco-centric stance, placing species, habitats and ecological connectivity at the center, while “monetizing nature” discourses simultaneously enable funding and narrow NbS to market logic. In response, this study proposes an ecocentric NbS assessment framework that reorients existing tools toward whole-ecosystem challenges, prioritizing indicators such as species diversity, ecological connectivity and robust impact design. By treating ecosystems as intrinsic beneficiaries rather than infrastructures for human gain, this framework makes visible the uneven ecological exchanges underpinning ostensibly “nature-positive” urban projects.

Presentation short abstract

Bioeconomy in the Amazon is a contested narrative, being used by some actors to justify business-as-usual forest product expansion while others use it to support local sociobiodiversity economies. The paper will focus on tensions between market-oriented and justice-oriented goals.

Presentation long abstract

The Amazon is a stage for multiple imaginaries and interests, where conservation narratives are continually reshaped by diverse actors. Recently, bioeconomy has emerged as a paradigm aiming to reconcile development, conservation, and environmental justice in the region. First proposed for the Amazon by climate-change researchers, this perspective underscores the importance of local producers in biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation. Bioeconomy has since spread rapidly; at COP30 in Belém, hundreds of events centered on the topic.

Yet the narrative has become highly contested. Corporations, state agencies, and some IENGOs have adopted bioeconomy as a business-as-usual framework to justify initiatives such as compensation schemes, certification programs, and the expansion of forest-based product markets. In contrast, local NGOs and grassroots organizations use the concept to strengthen sociobiodiversity economies grounded in sustainable production and nature-based relations.

In this paper, I will analyze the multiple meanings and framings of the bioeconomy narrative to identify tensions and potential points of connection. The discussion will focus on the contrasting conceptualization of bioeconomy, mobilized both as a form of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and as nature-inspired justice, and will examine the challenges that limit its transformative potential.

Presentation short abstract

We explore how the narrow focus on NbS in schoolyard transformations as a “fix” to educational challenges poses an empty signifier while overrunning an emerging relational narrative shift visible in how diverse actors place growing emphasis on care as practiced in schoolyards.

Presentation long abstract

We explore how the implementation of nature-based solutions (NbS) in schoolyard transformations is enabling or blocking transformative change for biodiversity through the case of a municipal schoolyard greening pilot program in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, with the participation of 14 public pre- and primary schools since 2022. The program is framed under the broad and ambitious goals of achieving inclusion, co-education, and sustainability in school environments through a participatory co-design of smaller nature-based solutions and their long-term co-governance together with educational communities. These goals are specifically targeting various structural educational challenges, including school segregation or nature-disconnected, top-down learning. Drawing on a participatory research approach, including document analysis, archival data, and field- and workshop-based research, we explore the mismatch and tensions derived from envisioned ambitious goals and the actual realities of schoolyard interventions through a narrow focus on NbS. Borrowing Broad´s (2016) “magic carrot” metaphor that describes the narrative attached to school garden projects as “magically” solving structural injustices faced by children of marginalized communities by enabling “life-changing” experiences through gardening, our results show how the narrow focus on NbS as a “fix” to educational challenges risks becoming an empty signifier overrunning an emerging relational narrative shift. This shift becomes visible for instance in how diverse actors place growing emphasis on care as learned and practiced in schoolyards — towards peers, place, and non-human species. Such a shift contains the potential for longer and deeper participatory processes, enabling educational communities to influence planning decisions in ways that reflect their lived needs and aspirations.

Presentation short abstract

Exploring the controversies around CBD's 2022 GBF negociations, this communication highlights how the integration of Nature-based Solutions in that agreement has become a symbolic battle between actors trying to institutionnalize different framings of climate and biodiversity policy integration.

Presentation long abstract

Despite broad agreement on the importance of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for addressing climate and biodiversity crises, integrating NbS into multilateral environmental agreement has become highly contested. Building on scholarship examining conflicts in global biodiversity governance (Corson et al., 2014; Campbell et al., 2014), this communication analyzes this controversy through the elaboration of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), adopted under the CBD in 2022. While some states (EU, UK) and several NGOs sought to institutionalize NbS by securing their inclusion in the GBF, others—Brazil, South Africa and critical NGOs—worked to delegitimize this effort. Although policy entrepreneurs achieved partial institutionalization, it relied on an expansive and ambiguous framing of climate–biodiversity integration and remained contested.

This communication examines tensions surrounding NbS in the GBF, how actors reframed the concept, and the political work undertaken to embed NbS in the agreement. By analyzing NbS politicization within the CBD, we contribute to growing social-science research on NbS politics at the international level (Melanidis & Hagerman, 2022; Tozer et al., 2022; Qi & Dauvergne, 2022). The analysis draws on GBF negotiation reports and ten interviews with state and NGO participants conducted between 2022 and 2024.

Disputes around NbS reflect competing framing efforts (Benford & Snow, 2000; van Hulst & Yanow, 2016) over the meaning of climate–biodiversity integration. NbS proponents follow IUCN’s framing, presenting integration as a technical issue NbS can address. Opponents instead frame it as social and political, involving environmental justice, sovereignty and finance inequities issues. Consequently, GBF decisions reflect power relations rather than consensus.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses the negotiation of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) in Pará’s J-REDD+ system, focusing on how consultation processes can reproduce power asymmetries and territorial inequalities, and on how Indigenous and traditional communities contest and reshape the terms of consent.

Presentation long abstract

Despite growing criticism, forest carbon offsetting remains positioned as a key nature-based solution for mitigating climate change, and it is re-emerging in new institutional forms. The current shift towards jurisdictional REDD+ (J-REDD+), as seen in the development of a state-level system in the state of Pará, Brazil, shows how offsetting mechanisms persist by mobilising new governance structures, actors’ alliances, and legitimising narratives. In this context, the requirement of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) has become central to the governmental and corporate discourse, as well as to the demands of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. While state and corporate actors present FPIC as evidence of procedural integrity and inclusion, initial consultation processes reveal imbalances in representation, access to information, and decision-making authority. This raises a critical question: to what extent do consultation processes challenge or reproduce existing power relations, knowledge hierarchies, and territorial inequalities?

Drawing on empirical research conducted in Pará in 2025, this paper examines how FPIC is operationalised, negotiated and contested in the development of Pará's J-REDD+ system. It analyses how procedural and informational asymmetries shape participation, how uneven territorial and political capacities generate intersectional exclusions, and how communities and civil society actors contest or strategically reinterpret FPIC. While centred on Pará, the analysis situates FPIC practices within broader multi-scalar climate governance, showing how actors mobilise national legal frameworks, international norms, and arenas such as the COP30 (held in Belém) to contest the terms of consent and to make visible forms of injustice embedded in carbon offsetting initiatives.

Presentation short abstract

The implementation of Nature-Based Solutions for Groundwater Protection raises environmental justice issues. The study of two French aquifers reveals three main themes: informational asymmetries, diverse environmental efforts among farmers and diverging justice perceptions among stakeholders.

Presentation long abstract

In response to growing pressures on groundwater resources, the implementation of Nature-Based Solutions for Sustainable Groundwater Protection (NBS-GW) on recharge areas offers promising pathways to protect aquifers and to sustain the services they provide, including water storage and the supply of high-quality drinking water. However, the implementation of NBS-GW raises specific and complex questions of environmental justice. Our analysis seeks to explore the justice-related challenges associated with the adoption and implementation of NBS-GW, mobilizing the environmental justice framework based on the analysis of procedural, distribution and recognition justice. Our study is firstly based on a literature review, highlighting justice issues associated with 5 specific features of NBS-GW. Then, we conduct an empirical analysis of two strategic groundwater resources in France - the aquifers of Lez and of Evian - combining a qualitative survey based on semi-structured interviews and a documentary analysis. Following a thematic and multi-site analysis, we inductively identify three cross-case environmental justice themes: (1) Asymmetries and informational inequalities in the construction of NBS-GW programs, (2) Diverse environmental efforts amongst farmers in terms of NBS-GW adoption (3) Diverging justice perceptions regarding NBS-GW programs amongst territorial stakeholders. The analysis of our results highlights multiple connections between the specific features identified in the literature and the findings from our empirical study. It also allows us to adopt a critical perspective on the concept of NBS and a reflexive position on the environmental justice framework.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on empirical fieldwork, this contribution examines how collective action interacts with urban biodiversity restoration projects through a social-ecological justice lens. It opens up on a North–South comparative framework attentive to perceived historical and territorial inequalities.

Presentation long abstract

This contribution examines how collective practices of environmental care and biodiversity restoration in urban settings can be understood through a social-ecological justice lens, combining insights from multispecies justice, ecological justice, and environmental justice scholarship. Building on empirical fieldwork conducted in post-industrial metropolitan contexts (Rochard, 2023), it shows how everyday civic actions—such as habitat restoration, soil care, micro-forest planting or the maintenance of urban green infrastructures—reconfigure relations between humans, biodiversity and urban environments. These situated practices reveal forms of more-than-human alliances as well as persistent territorial tensions that shape who benefits from, participates in, and is affected by urban ecological transformations.

The presentation argues that social-ecological justice offers a productive analytical framework for interpreting these dynamics, as it foregrounds both ecological quality and the intertwined social conditions that enable or constrain meaningful local participation.

Extending this lens toward a North–South comparative perspective, the contribution outlines a framework for examining how Nature-based Solutions institutional projects are translated, negotiated and appropriated in diverse socio-political, historical and ecological contexts. Particular attention is given to how long-standing injustices (epistemic, participatory, of recognition) linked to socio-spatial segregation processes and differentiated socio-economic conditions shape residents’ capacities to engage with or benefit from ecological restoration projects. This framework aims to support future comparative research capable of identifying both convergences in more-than-human urban practices and context-specific forms of social-ecological justice. Two case-study avenues will be further investigated: a mangrove restoration project in southern Senegal and another project located near low-income neighborhoods in a European metropolis.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how civic stewardship and sociotechnical imaginaries shape just hydrosocial transformations in the Besòs river, Barcelona, revealing how Nature-Based Solutions mediate emerging narratives of justice, resilience, and climate adaptation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how civic environmental stewardship and sociotechnical imaginaries shape the hydrosocial transformation of the Besòs river (Barcelona) through Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). The case of the Besòs is particularly significant as urban rivers remain largely absent from the explicit targets of Nature Restoration Laws , despite being vital socio-ecological systems where water governance, biodiversity, and urban transformation converge. In recent years, the renaturalization of the Besòs has been advanced through projects supported by the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), the Consorci Besòs-Tordera, and the Pla Estratègic Metropolità de Barcelona (PEMB). In all of them, the reuse of regenerated water plays a central role in enabling new forms of NbS implementation. Drawing on Political Ecology and the hydrosocial cycle framework, this research explores how policymakers, experts, and civic actors negotiate competing visions of restoration, resilience, and justice. Through interviews and policy analysis, the study identifies an emerging sociotechnical imaginary of a “future-proofed” river, where technological innovation in water reuse is positioned as both ecological restoration and climate adaptation. Yet these narratives, while promising resilience, also reproduce inequalities and raise new concerns about access, affordability, and health. By integrating the concepts of futures-in-the-making and nature-inspired justice, the paper argues that the Besòs river may serve as a laboratory for reimagining NbS as political and ethical arenas where technological futures, ecological care, and civic claims for environmental justice intersect. This paper is framed under the research project “HYDROSOCIAL”.

Presentation short abstract

Concerns over justice in Nature-based solutions are likely to be amplified when scaling NbS across places. We present a conceptual framework on justice in NbS scaling co-developed following a transdisciplinary approach.

Presentation long abstract

Concerns over justice in Nature-based solutions have been raised as they, inter alia, may generate or intensify already existing socio-spatial inequalities, perpetuate the lack of recognition and involvement of vulnerable stakeholders in decision-making processes and promote speculative development. Such concerns are likely to be amplified when scaling NbS across contexts and places.

Our paper presents a conceptual framework on justice in NbS scaling co-developed following a transdisciplinary approach that includes: a) several workshops among FairNature project members, b) a transnational Lab Exchange with experts, c) insights from “thick descriptions” of six action cases and d) a literature review. The framework builds on the assumption that NbS delivery at wide scale can only generate lasting transformative change if the scaling approach towards geographical expansion is embedded in the political, organisational and cultural context. Such a scaling approach must include: i) scaling up to higher policy level changes in laws, policies, or norms to foster institutional change for NbS; ii) scaling down by (re-)allocating necessary resources and means (e.g. incentives, regulations, funding) to support NbS implementation and impact; iii) scaling in by ensuring organisations have the structure, capacity, functions or skills to deliver NbS; and iv) scaling deep through achieving transformative change in practices, norms, beliefs and values and reflexive learning.

We categorize observations of justice in these scaling practices, including – among others – dimensions of distributive, procedural, recognition, intergenerational, and multispecies justice. The result is a comprehensive framework establishing the links between scaling and justices and possible synergies and tradeoffs.

Presentation short abstract

This study aims to explore how bio-inspired Nature-based Solutions integrated with renewable energy technologies can contribute to ecological and social justice in urban settings. It employs a Q-methodology to investigate diverse individuals’ perspectives on the human-nature relationship.

Presentation long abstract

While cities have driven economic growth and well-being, they have also deepened socio-economic inequalities and contributed to biodiversity loss through the expansion of the built environment. Moreover, meeting the growing energy needs of urban populations places additional pressure on ecosystems. For many years biodiversity conservation received limited attention in urban planning and policy. This began to shift in 2024, when the European Union introduced the Nature Restoration Law (NRL), which also suggests that restoration of biodiversity should be considered renewable energy strategies. To accomplish this goal, the NRL promotes Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as key instruments. However, while their positive contribution from an environmental perspective has never been questioned, there has been criticism regarding the anthropocentric lens used in their application. This study adopts an ecological justice lens to examine the role that NbS planning can play in restoring and improving biodiversity in urban areas. It also explores, through the dimension of recognitional justice, whether NbS can address the needs and rights of both more-than-human nature and socio-economic vulnerable groups. To this end, this study employs Q-methodology, a mixed method approach that allows to investigate diverse individuals’ perspectives on human-nature relationship. The NbS case study focuses on community gardens integrated with PV systems, enabling the simultaneous restoration of biodiversity, food cultivation, and renewable energy production. The aim is to exploring how such multifunctional NbS can contribute to both ecological and social justice in urban settings.