Presentation short abstract

In this intervention, we reflect on the assemblage of labour inherent in the production of nature, and hence the fundamentally uneven process of ecological exchange embodied in the production of Nature-based Solutions (NbS).

Presentation long abstract

Nature does not “exist” as a passive object or something in the background, but is actively assembled as a product of class relations (Moore, 2017). Nature for conservation or for “green” / ecology purposes is similarly an actively constructed category - based on putting both human and non-human labour to work towards its production. This means a historically and territorially-specific assessment of class-relations in the extraction, transformation and organization of “nature” products/commodities for exchange. More humans and non-humans need to be put to work to produce solutions that will fix ecological problems and therefore in the process resell themselves as laborers for “Nature-based Solutions,” (NbS) forming a part of a new “green” economy. Everybody and every creature must contribute something to the table - whether it is a dung beetle providing an environmental service, humus-rich soils full of microorganisms and mycorrhizal fungi providing a Nature-based Solution, an ArcGIS technician or forest stewardship certification auditor employed in a ‘green job’, or policymakers and academics discursively performing a "green" agenda. We all just need to be more creative/innovative and continuously put labour to the task to produce a service, new and better. In this intervention, we reflect on the fundamentally uneven process of ecological exchange embodied in the production of NbS.

Presentation short abstract

By analysing carbon trading on voluntary carbon markets, this contribution proposes a quantification of the unequal ecological and economic exchange promoted by the carbon offsetting paradigm.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the critical scholarship and media coverage discussing its controversial track record in terms of effectiveness and social feasibility, carbon offsetting remains one of the key mechanisms within global climate governance, as demonstrated by the recent proliferation of bilateral and multilateral agreements under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. In this contribution, based on a recently-published paper as well as ongoing research, we address an understudied dimension of the offsetting paradigm, with a focus on the voluntary carbon market and nature-based ‘solutions’: we show how carbon trading constitutes a form of unequal ecological and economic exchange and attempt a novel quantification of the global unequal exchange through carbon credits. To ground our hypotheses, in addition to global-scale considerations, we analyse the carbon trading landscape of a particular country (Colombia) and offer a country-specific quantification of value plunder through carbon commodity chains. Moreover, we seek to shed light on further value leakage and localised impacts through both formal and informal carbon brokers. In light of this, we believe our contribution would be a perfect fit for this panel and look forward to enriching our perspectives through the exchange with our co-panelists.

Presentation short abstract

This paper synthesizes findings from the BIO-JUST project, which examines the environmental justice of watershed NbS across several case studies spanning Europe and South America.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as promising interventions for addressing interconnected environmental challenges, offering potential benefits for climate adaptation, mitigation, and biodiversity conservation. Despite their growing prominence in policy frameworks, critical questions remain about whether NbS deliver on their dual promise of ecological effectiveness and social equity. This paper synthesizes findings from the BIO-JUST project, which examines watershed NbS across several case studies spanning Europe and South America to investigate the conditions under which NbS successfully support biodiversity conservation and provide ecosystem services while promoting environmental justice. Our findings challenge assumptions that environmental injustices are concentrated primarily in the Global South, revealing that inequitable outcomes also emerge within EU contexts. We identify critical factors shaping justice outcomes: recognition of rights, different knowledges and worldviews is necessary but insufficient without accompanying redistributive, reparatory and procedural measures; dominant framings of water security that emphasize provision inadvertently create inequalities, necessitating a relational approach that acknowledges dynamic water-society interactions; and injustices are most often created or reinforced when NbS implementation privileges powerful actors meanings of "nature" while marginalizing alternative understandings. We conclude with recommendations for policy and practice to ensure NbS interventions advance biodiversity conservation while upholding principles of environmental justice across diverse geographical and political contexts.

Presentation short abstract

Mapping key actors, financial and labor flows involved in incentive-based NbS projects offers insights on the extent to which uneven ecological exchange is a structural condition to the implementation of such mechanisms — with significant implications for justice and socio-ecological ownership.

Presentation long abstract

Incentive-based mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are long-standing and highly popular strategies, often falling under the label of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). In this contribution, we analyze the extent to which social justice, political legitimacy and power asymmetries are central features of how NbS are implemented and have significant implications in addressing intersectional forms of inequality where NbS are implemented. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis to map financial and labor flows, and key actors involved in incentive-based NbS research and program design/financing. In doing so, we seek to understand how and to what extent uneven ecological exchange is a structural condition to the implementation of incentive-based NbS projects. We argue for the adoption of a reparative justice lens in the design and implementation of such schemes as a means to reclaim socio-ecological ownership by those co-producing nature.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how PES research addresses justice and argues for a Reparative Justice approach. A theoretical and systematic review shows current work focuses narrowly on project-level justice, overlooking historical and structural harms. A reparative lens can deepen justice analysis on PES.

Presentation long abstract

Research on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has largely prioritised technical and managerial concerns, often overlooking the historical, political, and socioeconomic conditions shaping environmental problems. This stands in contrast to reparative justice debates, which call for addressing historically inherited structures that drive today’s ecological crises and unequal burdens.

This dissertation examined how PES research engages with justice issues and how a Reparative Justice (RJ) approach could strengthen it. The study combined a theoretical literature review—building a conceptual basis for Environmental Justice (EJ) in PES and developing a Reparative Environmental Justice (REJ) framework—with a systematic review of 61 empirical PES studies addressing justice. Together, these phases assessed how justice is currently conceptualised in the field.

Findings show that justice-related PES research mirrors broader trends: it focuses mainly on distributive, procedural, and recognition justice at an individual project level. This narrow scope sidelines global and historical environmental injustices, limiting engagement with deeper questions about moral responsibility for environmental harm and the systemic changes needed to address the environmental crisis.

The study recommends integrating an REJ approach to broaden justice analyses in PES. Such an approach encourages critical engagement with environmental solutions that acknowledge historical debts to marginalised communities and to nature. A set of analytical questions is offered to guide future research.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation discusses a saltpan restoration site in the Camargue, France: how it became known as an NbS, and its features of ‘infrastructural nature’. Using interviews and participant observation, it explores conflicting interests and processes of devaluation related to coastal infrastructure.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have risen to prominence within the mainstream discourse of biodiversity conservation. How the concept is adopted and applied for specific projects remains relatively unexplored, however. This presentation discusses the case study of former industrial saltpans in the Camargue, France as an example of a restoration project that came to be described as an NbS given its characteristics relevant to climate change and sea-level rise. The research, drawing upon semi-structured interviews and participant observation, discusses why the concept was used, how it was selectively employed depending on the audience, the ambivalence about its adoption, and ultimately the politicisation of the concept by commercial actors in opposition to its implementation. Specifically, these contentions will be related to the maintenance of coastal protection infrastructure and the site’s historical and evolving value, as significant determinants of the project’s development and local popularity. Far from treating NbS as a self-evident signifier, the presentation will assess: what is being solved, how is the solution distributed, and which nature(s) this solution is based upon. In doing so, the research will bring the climate vulnerability experienced by local actors into conversation with place-based historical understandings of nature that shape the responsiveness to concepts like NbS. The extension of conceptual work around ‘infrastructural natures’ will be discussed in the presentation, particularly its implications for governance and capital accumulation. Finally, the post-industrial context of the site raises questions around processes of devaluation, offering a complementary lens compared to other work on NbS informed by economic valuation.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Nature-based Solutions in Chiapas and Pará interact with rural inequalities and political economies. Comparing agroforestry programmes, it shows how governance, funding, and local contestation shape autonomy, conflict, and alternatives to market-driven climate policy.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have become central to climate and conservation policy, yet in frontier regions of the Global South they often reproduce uneven ecological exchange by embedding rural livelihoods within market-oriented logics, extractivist development agendas, and donor-driven conditionalities. This paper draws on early findings from a comparative study of agroforestry interventions in Chiapas, Mexico, and Pará, Brazil, to examine how NbS projects are designed, governed, and contested. Both regions—marked by deforestation, agrarian inequality, and strong Indigenous and traditional farming systems—have become testing sites for state- and donor-led NbS programmes such as Sembrando Vida in Mexico and Florestas Produtivas in Brazil. While framed as pro-poor climate solutions, these interventions intersect with land conflicts, large-scale infrastructure development, fraught rural political economies, and broader agricultural frontiers shaped by export-driven (green) extractivism and logistics to promote it.

Drawing on policy analysis and interviews, we show how institutional arrangements, funding mechanisms, and civil society participation approaches shape communities’ autonomy, programme legitimacy, and the reproduction or disruption of rural inequalities. NbS interventions emerge as contested terrains where agribusiness actors, municipal governments, and traditional communities clash over meanings of “restoration” and resources for environmental protection, often normalizing new forms of conflict, enclosure, and top-down territorial planning. By foregrounding local perceptions and participatory action research, the paper contributes to debates on counter-practices that strengthen community protagonism, accountability, and alternative agroecology models beyond market-oriented approaches, as well as reflecting on the conditions to challenge the development patterns driving the climate crisis at different scales.

Presentation short abstract

I develop a more-than-human political ecology of the Elbe estuary to investigate how ecologies of repair renegotiate human–estuarine relations, center–periphery dynamics, and the interfaces between land and water.

Presentation long abstract

The port of Hamburg is the third-largest port in Europe and is located approximately 120 km from the North Sea in the inner delta of the vast Elbe estuary. The expansion and maintenance of the port requires continuous hydrological interventions. These include permanent maintenance dredging to ensure that the shipping channel remains sufficiently deep, regular capital dredging to accommodate larger vessels, and environmental offsetting measures. In the latest round of deepening, 32 million m³ of sediment were removed between 2019 and 2021. However, regular draft restrictions illustrate that this intervention has been challenged by the unruliness of the estuary and its increasing sediment loads. To reduce sediment loads caused by tidal pumping effects and to ensure compliance with EU and federal environmental law, “nature” is increasingly framed as an important solution for maintaining accessibility to Germany’s largest port. Nature-based solutions, building with nature, and ecosystem restoration were key measures in the planning approval of the latest deepening and are now being implemented across the estuary. I use the Elbe estuary as an example to unpack how the politics of ecological repair are inscribed in contemporary estuarine landscapes and seascapes. My contribution builds on an analysis of planning documents, newspaper articles, qualitative interviews, and participant observation, focusing on conflicts and tensions among the estuarine population, environmental NGOs, and state agencies. Conceptually, I develop a more-than-human political ecology of the Elbe estuary to investigate how ecologies of repair renegotiate human–estuarine relations, center–periphery dynamics, and the interfaces between land and water.

Presentation short abstract

In Realengo, a peripheral district of Rio de Janeiro, Parque Realengo Susana Naspolini includes interventions that resemble NbS, though not labeled as such. This study examines how they reshape power relations, governance, and environmental inequalities.

Presentation long abstract

Realengo, a district in Rio de Janeiro, is shaped by uneven urbanization, limited public investment, and socio-environmental vulnerability—conditions emblematic of contexts in the Global South. 2024 inauguration of Parque Realengo Susana Naspolini introduces an urban intervention that, although not explicitly framed as a Nature-based Solution (NbS), incorporates associated infrastructures, including sustainable drainage systems, rain gardens, bioretention swales, rainwater harvesting installations, and reforestation with native Atlantic Forest species to mitigate flooding and reduce urban heat.

A political ecology lens highlights how locally embedded green infrastructures are shaped by political-economic dynamics informing the circulation of global NbS models. Critical scholarship warns that even technically framed, environmentally beneficial interventions may reproduce power asymmetries, depoliticize structural drivers of socio-environmental harm, or introduce new modalities of territorial control—dynamics that intensify in marginalized peripheries.

Grounded in climate justice frameworks emphasizing equity, recognition, and meaningful participation, this study examines whether the park’s design and implementation align with justice-oriented principles. The case demonstrates how territorialized green interventions can enhance resilience and environmental quality in historically neglected areas, while revealing governance tensions, maintenance challenges, and green gentrification risks. These dynamics raise questions about who benefits and how these interventions may reinforce unequal ecological exchange in urban settings.

Linking the Realengo case to debates on NbS as spatial fixes and as instruments that normalize new environmental governance regimes, the presentation argues that Parque Realengo Susana Naspolini is a relevant yet contested example of urban climate adaptation. Its long-term effectiveness depends on institutional arrangements for community autonomy, transparency, accountability, and monitoring.

Presentation short abstract

The Amazon has long been politically projected as a region for development. Such politics eschews the labour of those producing the forest diverse as it is. We reflect on how delivering development is now associated with NBS that appropriate ways of ‘labouring’ the forest producing biodiversity.

Presentation long abstract

The fact that the Brazilian Amazon has long been projected for development eschews the labour of those producing forest biodiversity, leading to a double-movement of appropriation. On one hand, there is a contemporary flux framing biodiversity as a given, disavowing the knowledge of those inhabiting the forest who produce biodiversity through a non-proprietary land-use regime. On the other hand, there is an older flux characterised by violent land occupation due to its emptiness that engenders the consolidation of a colonial habitation (Ferdinand, 2022) that fractures the environment (forest) from its social constructiveness, fuelling legal forms of expropriation. The assemblage and accumulation of land as such produced a colonial territory in the Amazon connected to the uneven exchange of land, but also of senses and sensibilities about what the rainforest should be designed for.

Both as neo-extractivist or sustainable, development is the curse of the region and the source and symptom of appropriating space unevenly. A less discussed consequence of it is how it shaped control over collective experiences of managing and relating to the forest. In this paper, we reflect on how delivering development has been associated with Nature-Based Solutions schemes that appropriate ways of ‘labouring’ the forest that produce high-integrity climate and environmental mitigation results. For critically analysing this next step of valuing nature by devaluing its people and de-risking their resistance, we look at the regenerative agricultural practices that were proposed by the Brazilian government as NBS in alliance with major traders and fertiliser industries in the world.

Presentation short abstract

A systematic review examining how justice is operationalized across the NBS project cycle, revealing uneven integration of justice principles and highlighting opportunities to support more inclusive and accountable NBS practices.

Presentation long abstract

Justice has been raised as a key element in the planning and implementation of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) to ensure they are relevant to their social-ecological context, by providing desired benefits while avoiding the creation of new challenges. However, as NBS become more mainstream and the concept of justice evolves, understandings of what constitutes just NBS development remain heterogeneous and inconsistent across cases. This ambiguity is concerning given that NBS interventions may unintentionally reproduce existing power asymmetries and socio-environmental inequalities.

This presentation introduces a systematic literature review examining how justice is operationalized across the NBS project cycle, focusing on case studies that explicitly engage with justice principles. Drawing on diverse justice traditions, including distributional, procedural, recognition, restorative and ecological justice, as well as intersectional and more-than-human perspectives, the review explores two questions: (a) which forms of justice are addressed during the planning, implementation, maintenance and monitoring of NBS, and (b) which practices have been developed to pursue just outcomes.

Preliminary insights show that justice is widely acknowledged but unevenly integrated across phases, with most attention concentrated on planning and design, while implementation, maintenance and monitoring receive far less consideration. Non-human subjects of justice also appear infrequently, and distributive perspectives remain the most common approach.

By situating these patterns within the broader governance dynamics of NBS, the study aims to contribute to the panel’s discussion on how NBS practices may unintentionally reinforce inequalities or, alternatively, support more legitimate, accountable, and inclusive outcomes for communities.

Presentation short abstract

This paper applies an ecofeminist political economy lens to payments for ecosystem services in Brazil, revealing how gendered and racialised labour inequalities remain overlooked in PES schemes and analyses, risking the reinforcement of existing injustices

Presentation long abstract

This paper develops an ecofeminist political economy (EPE) critique of nature-based solutions, focusing on payments for ecosystem services (PES). A recent intervention identified PES as a – well-financed – ‘hype’ with a minimal and contested empirical evidence base: with Global North institutions driving recommendations for the Global South based on empirical research in seven so-called ‘darling’ countries (Kolinjivadi et al., 2023). This recent contribution adds to a compelling body of critical scholarship focused on equity and social justice implications of PES. However, while political ecology, critical geography, and neoliberal conservation literature warns of potential negative social equity outcomes on-the-ground, work highlighting gendered and racialised inequalities still remains fragmented and rarely intersectional. This is particularly the case when considering the central role of labour involved in making PES work. Drawing on EPE, this paper makes two moves: It advances an EPE-approach to analyses of PES; and it demonstrates the analytical value of EPE through an analysis of payments for forest ecosystem services in Brazil, drawing on primary data from research on the Amazon Fund and its projects. It posits that given longstanding recognition of gendered and racialised material divisions of productive labour, unpaid care work (social reproduction), and environmental work (conservation care labour) in conservation schemes, the lack of empirical, intersectional analyses of PES risks reinforcing and invisibilising existing inequalities. The paper concludes that strategies, guidelines, and tools to reappropriate financial flows will fall short if they do not advance a materialist feminist approach to labour underlying PES.

Presentation short abstract

REDD+ transforms forests into the immaterial commodity of carbon credits. Corporations and states to extract benefits from local communities by creating dependency and shifting socioecological burdens along power asymmetries that intersect with neocolonialism, racism, class, and patriarchy.

Presentation long abstract

Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) aims to mitigate emissions through conservation, transforming forests into sites of commodified carbon storage. Unlike traditional commodities, is an immaterial commodity, quantified and traded as carbon to offset emissions elsewhere. This allows corporations and states to extract benefits from local communities and shift socioecological burdens along power asymmetries that intersect with neocolonialism, racism, class inequalities, and patriarchy.

Critics argue that REDD+ reinforces neoliberal conservation and deepens injustices by restricting local communities' access to forests and vital resources, often leading to land dispossession, while failing to deliver meaningful climate mitigation or economic benefits for local populations. Indigenous movements denounce REDD+ as a form of green colonialism, imposing external conservation models that disregard traditional land governance and customary rights.

We investigate how REDD+ creates ‘green sacrifice zones’ and the ways in which local communities resist or align with these projects. The examination of case studies reveals systemic drivers, narratives of affected communities, and opposition strategies. We also analyze barriers for resisting projects: lack of information, the need for basic services and economic opportunities, and the lack of land tenure rights that allow for legal recourse.

Dependency on economic benefits from REDD+ forces communities to align with a fossil system that harms their biocultural landscapes and erodes traditional ontologies and epistemologies, creating an impossible conundrum between climate stability and income. These struggles reveal the limitations of market-based climate solutions and point towards the necessity of decolonial and justice-oriented approaches to environmental governance.