Presentation short abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have become central to the EU’s climate policy, yet the manual and intellectual labour requirements necessary for their implementation remain understudied. This paper examines labour representation in NBS projects and policies through document analysis and interviews.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have become a key policy pillar and buzzword in climate adaptation, green transition, and biodiversity conservation approaches for the EU, Member States, and their regions (Faivre et. al., 2017; Kotsila et. al., 2021). Promising “win-win” socio-ecological outcomes, NBS implementation depends on labour-intensive processes (e.g. design, implementation, maintenance, monitoring) which remain largely invisible or poorly accounted for in policy and scholarly discourse (Mabon, 2023; van der Ree, 2019). This is additionally compounded by often-racialized labour markets, particularly in relation to physical, precarious, hazardous agricultural, or nature restoration work (Mahanty et. al., 2020; Neimark et. al., 2020).

This paper brings together the lenses of the conservation eco-precariat (Neimark et. al., 2020; Neimark, 2023) and environmental justice in NBS (Anguelovski & Corbera, 2023) to investigate labour represention in NBS projects and supporting policies. Moving from EU policies to their operationalization in Spain and Catalonia, the research employs qualitative coding of policy and project documents and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders to distil the place and role given to labour in NBS, and identify power relationships that shape the representation, empowerment, or erasure of marginalized workers. Visibilizing labour is necessary to challenge dominant narratives that commodify natural resilience and ecosystem services but obscure the human and more-than-human work which sustains them (Kaluarachchi, 2025; Stanley et. al., 2025). The article concludes by foregrounding human exploitation and racial capitalism in green transitions (Welden, 2023) and calls for greater sensitivity to labour issues and their justice implications in the EU’s environmental action programs.