Dear Community of Practice,
What role do environmental justice considerations play in your daily work?
What key aspects do you think need to be considered for the planning of low carbon AND just cities?
As part of the EU HORIZON project, JUSTNature, we are conducting a survey to understand how urban planners and practitioners address these questions. This in particular refers to the importance you attribute to activating low carbon and high air quality nature-based solutions (NbS)*. As part of the survey, we would like to test some of our concepts and assumptions on different identified justice components (e.g., air quality injustice, thermal injustices, carbon injustices, spatial injustices, flora, fauna, and habitat inclusive, temporal injustices) in NbS. There are no right or wrong answers. Every input is important.
The overall objective of JUSTNature is the activation of nature-based solutions (NbS) by ensuring a just transition to low-carbon cities, based on the principle of the right to ecological space. This encompasses the right to clean air and indoor/outdoor thermal comfort for human health and well-being, as well as thriving biodiversity and ecosystems. It also entails the duty of not constraining the ecological space of others, in particular in relation to the mitigation of climate change and measures required for reducing GHG emissions. JUSTNature will contribute to this vision of shaping low-carbon cities by developing a set of typical Low carbon | High air quality NbS in seven European city practice labs.
The survey should take approximately 20 minutes. Your responses are completely anonymous and the data we collect will be used only for this research.
If you want to be informed about the results of this survey and receive other news from JUSTNature project, please visit our project website (
https://justnatureproject.eu/) or send an email to Yirang Lim at
lim@isocarp-institute.org
*Nature based solutions (NbS): Actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits”. They are just one of a range of concepts used to frame nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Others refer to ecosystem-based adaptation, green infrastructure or ecosystem services.
Sources:
Cohen-Shacham, E., Walters, G., Janzen, C., & Maginnis, S. (2016). Nature-based Solutions to address global societal challenges. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
Díaz, S., Pascual, U., Stenseke, M., Martín-López, B., Watson, R. T., Molnár, Z., ... & Shirayama, Y. (2018). Assessing nature's contributions to people. Science, 359(6373), 270-272.
Pauleit, S., Zölch, T., Hansen, R., Randrup, T. B., & Konijnendijk van den Bosch, C. (2017). Nature-based solutions and climate change–four shades of green. In Nature-Based solutions to climate change adaptation in urban areas (pp. 29-49). Springer, Cham.
