FairNature

Context

In recent years, NbS have become a powerful way to address sustainability challenges by making use of diverse benefits provided by nature. NbS are key to meeting goals like the EU Biodiversity and Adaptation Strategies, the Bonn Challenge, and the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. To achieve these goals, NbS need to be implemented on a massive scale, across different social, economic, and environmental settings, with support from various organizations. If applied fairly and widely, NbS could transform how we address climate change, protect biodiversity, and improve human wellbeing. This could lead to major changes in our systems, including technology, economies, values, and governance. NbS have been effective in many local settings, but they can raise fairness issues because different groups may benefit or lose out in different ways. These concerns may become more significant as NbS are scaled out to larger areas.

Main objectives

Our core question is: How can NbS be delivered at a wide geographical scale in a just manner? FairNature’s overarching objective is to co-develop a framework to support multi-level NbS practitioners in achieving a just (out)scaling of NbS for fostering just transformative change, biodiversity protection, and societal well-being. Our scientific objectives are:

1. Diagnose, and produce new knowledge on justice implications of scaling NbS;
2. Identify conditions and formulate requirements for NbS scaling for just transformative change;

Assess biodiversity, values, justice, governance, and financing in specific applications of NbS and analyse the performance in different scaling approaches.

Main activities

FairNature will co-create, test, and improve NbS scaling approaches in six NbS action cases by involving local and wider networks and communities of NbS knowledge, practice and policy in Reflexive Labs. These cases span multiple sites and scales in six European countries, reflecting diverse geographical contexts and the whole innovation chain of NbS, including the private sector and funds. Representatives of the action cases will co-design the research framework, agenda, questions and methods.

Our main output will be a FairNature Guide for scaling approaches that leverage just transformative change. This guide will summarise the practical experience in the action cases and the output of our co-created research. Transnational practitioner exchanges and trans-project collaboration for knowledge transfer will realise a practical return for the action cases, tapping synergies in project activities and knowledge generation, and validating the FairNature Guide.

FairNature will build on diverse types of knowledge (e.g. scientific, practitioner, stakeholder, user) and provide guidance on combining scaling approaches that safeguard justice in scaling NbS, building on the results of multiple methods, including thick descriptions, trade-off analysis, policy evaluation, scenario methods, interviews, and experiments.