BIOdiversity and ecosystem protection driven by Environmental JUSTice

Governments, businesses, academics, and practitioners increasingly consider Nature-based Solutions (NbS) central to achieving international conservation and sustainable development objectives (e.g., the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate change, and the new global biodiversity framework). They also consider NbS for watershed provisioning ecosystem services (watershed NbS) as key for achieving water security while securing biodiversity and ecosystem conservation in a context of growing urbanization and climate change. However, the effectiveness of NbS in generating socially fair biodiversity and ecosystem protection remains contested. In fact, social-environmental injustice can be a driver of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation and a barrier to effective conservation, limiting social acceptance and allocating conservation benefits/costs in an inequitable manner, reinforcing or shifting power imbalances, often to the detriment of the underprivileged. BIO-JUST, therefore, investigates the environmental justice implications in the design, implementation, and evaluation of watershed NbS across seven case studies in Europe and Latin America: (1) the Brazilian Conservador da Mantiqueira Program, (2) the Colombian "Misiguay Forests” National park, (3) the environmental management of the Ecuadorian FONAG water fund, (4) the French watershed managed by the Association for the Protection of the Evian Spring Water Impluvium (APIEME), (5) the Portuguese Green Heart of Cork project, (6) the protected areas network on the Spanish island of La Palma, and (7) the management of the groundwater recharge landscape of the Dutch Southern Veluwe region. The novelty of BIO-JUST lies in its participatory, integrated, multidisciplinary, quantitative and qualitative assessment of the environmental justice implications and conservation impacts of several watershed NbS in contexts with different biophysical, institutional, social-economic, cultural and historical-political conditions. BIO-JUST, as a partnership of academia, civil society organizations, the public and the private sector, develops a robust conceptual framework and a replicable methodology to build environmental justice in designing, implementing, and assessing conservation actions and policies. It also identifies enabling conditions for long-term just conservation outcomes and co-develops indicators and science-based policy recommendations to support more effective and integrative ecosystem and biodiversity management through NbS in Europe, Latin America and beyond.