Transforming Nature-based Solutions into Inclusive Climate Actions

How can Inclusive Climate Actions (ICAs) inform Nature-Based-Solutions (NbS) in addressing urban inequalities and social and environmental injustices? This is the question at the root of the scientific report “Transforming Nature-Based-Solutions into Climate Actions”, written within GREEN-INC (abbreviation for GRowing Effective & Equitable Nature-based Solutions through INClusive Climate Actions), a collaborative research initiative undertaken among six European universities along the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Romania and Sweden and funded by the DUT partnership.

By Jannes Willems and Sara Betetto

Nature-Based Solutions are nowadays a key tool to help cities face the present and future challenges posed by climate change, yet they generally overlook issues pertaining to social justice. Although NbS can provide environmental, social, and economic benefits and helping build resilience, academic research sheds light on their limitation in benefiting the broader population. In this context, studies warn about their counterproductive potential to aggravate social-environmental inequalities existing in cities. Starting from this critical recognition, the report explores the meaning, benefits, and strategies of planning and implementation of Inclusive Climate Actions, and shows how merging the goals and logic of NbS and ICAs can potentially broaden the benefits of the two altogether.

The understanding of Inclusive Climate Action stems from the realisation that the worst-off will be hit hardest by climate impacts. Hence, ICAs always try to link environmental actions with social ones. In particular, they are aimed at reducing climate impacts on the most vulnerable segments of the population, and at ensuring fair distribution of climate burdens and climate action benefits. ICAs build on insights stemming from the fields of sustainable development, urban environmental justice, and green and just transition. Our literature review revealed that ICAs are developed in different sectors, i.e. Public Health, International Development Studies, and Urban Planning. In our review, we saw that ICAs typically aim to strengthen urban socio-environmental justice in distributive, procedural, and recognitional terms by providing for environmental actions while at the same time increasing social equity, providing economic opportunities and improvements in health and wellbeing, creating social cohesion and a strengthened social ownership of the environmental cause, and opening up the political space for underrepresented sections of the population.

To show evidence of the benefits of ICAs and to explore the way they are inclusively planned and realised, the study made use of a number of examples obtained from the C40 Cities network. This network recognises cities as a focal point in promoting better climate policies, and therefore it is committed to supporting municipalities all over the world in planning and realising climate actions which benefits are just and inclusive for the broader population. As seen from the case studies analysed, ICAs implemented with the support of C40 contribute to prioritising particularly the health and wellbeing of those segments of the population most socially and historically marginalised from climate policies (such as women and people with disabilities). This inclusion leads to an improvement in life standards -in terms of health, access to the urban space, and livelihood- as well as to a general amelioration in the policy making. Hence, climate action becomes more sensitive towards the priorities of and the difficulties faced by the most vulnerable population (therefore helping to reduce their socially and environmentally produced vulnerabilities).

ICAs hold the potential for NbS to shift attention more to issues of social equity, and public health and wellbeing. For example, a returning element in the ICAs analysed in this report was the focus on distributive justice, seen in questioning the accessibility of different communities and neighbourhoods and the exposure to climate impacts (e.g. such as increased temperatures because of heatwaves). Calls to enhance recognition justice has also been seen across literatures and cases, highlighting approaches that include marginalised groups in climate actions and tackle systemic inequalities. In contrast, more mainstream NbS theory and practice often argues in favour of “collaborative governance approaches” and “wide participation” without always acknowledging underlying power asymmetries. Hence, engaging with the aforementioned ICAs strategies can help improve NbS becoming more socially just and inclusive.