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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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All right, good evening. We'll get started. Welcome to our event this evening. To those of you here in the room and to those of you joining online, my name is Dr. Rebecca Elliott. I'm an Associate professor in the Department of Sociology. I'll be chairing tonight's event, sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Global School of Sustainability. Before I introduce tonight's speaker, just a few bits of housekeeping. Could you please take this opportunity to silence your phones? Per usual, we will have a chance for you to put your questions after Harriet has spoken. If you want to join the debates on social media, the hashtag for today's event is lsevents. We are also recording tonight's event and hope to release it as a podcast, barring any technical issues. And now to introduce our very special guest. Harriet Bulkley is Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University and is jointly appointed at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy of the Academy of the Social Sciences and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 2023. Harriet's work is concerned with the politics and governance of environmental issues. She has a particular interest in climate change and the roles of cities and other non state actors in responding. In her work on urban sustainability, Harriet has contributed to our understandings of energy, smart grids, infrastructure, housing, mobility, waste and most recently, nature and biodiversity. Throughout her work, questions of social and environmental justice are at the fore. So I won't list off the titles of her many books and articles. Instead, I'll tell you what I think they all have in common, which is that in her work, Harriet has this unbelievable ability to take some of the most complex issues and problems out there and make them make sense. She's able to hold in her mind and help us readers to hold in our minds the unavoidable complexity of political situations and social change, while at the same time giving us a way to think about them systematically so that we don't get lost in all of that complexity or paralyzed by it. Her work and her way of working is deeply reflexive and often collaborative, not only across disciplines, but with partners outside the academy. And for all these reasons, she has meaningfully impacted climate policy with the power of her insight, which was recognized with an award from the Royal Geographical Society. Harriet has actually been here all week as part of the Global School of Sustainability's new visitor scheme. So we are very thankful for the support of Jesus, not just for tonight's event, but for facilitating lots of quality time with her. Over the last few days, she has generously given her time to meeting with PhD students and other researchers one on one, and on Monday evening reflected on questions of climate methodologies with the Social Life of Climate Change seminar. During that seminar, she dropped some very intriguing hints about some of the material in tonight's talk, and we're so looking forward to hearing more. Now, please join me in welcoming Professor Harriet Bulkley.
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Thank you very much, Rebecca. It's lovely to be here. I think I'm probably going to be needed by the lecture because my flights are not going to change themselves. Okay, so that's. Yeah, I'm hoping that the mic is on. On this lectern. Is that all right? Yep. Okay. Perfect. Those ones have nice green lights, this one doesn't, you know. So you get that? Yeah. Thank you very much to the Global School of Sustainability and Sociology and of course to Rebecca for being such a nice host over the week. It's been amazing to meet people one to one and hear all about your fantastic research. And I hope that those discussions have been interesting for you as well as for me. They certainly help me. Yeah. Help me think a little bit about where we are with the climate change social sciences at the moment, meeting colleagues from across anthropology, political science and sociology at the same time. You've also given me quite a task in trying to be simple and complex at the same time, which I do try to enjoy. I enjoy doing and I do try to make that. That's something that I do. I hope in tonight's lecture we'll be able to get through some conceptual ideas, but always through also rooting that in empirical work. So, without further ado, I want to talk to you about work that is in progress, and it's in progress in various different ways. I want to acknowledge, to start with, that this is work that has been produced in relationship with a lot of other colleagues. So it derives mainly from two different projects that I've been working on over the last decade with large teams of researchers. One's called naturevation and the next one's called Naturescapes. And they do build on each other. And you'll see elements of those specific projects in some of the work that I present tonight. But I just want to acknowledge all of the researchers and colleagues who've worked on that with me and who've helped form my thinking and whose material is part of tonight's presentation. Before we start, okay, does anybody know where this is? Bit of a geography question to kick off with. Anybody got any idea where it might be? You don't have to have an answer. Nobody has to answer out loud. Okay, this is a place called Woodbury Wetlands in Hackney. Anybody get that? Right? You feel slightly satisfied with yourself, so that's good. But this is also a place that we could now think of as pretty much everywhere. It's both a specific place, but it's also a place that we can find everywhere. Across cities, globally, we're increasingly seeing nature being created or restored towards specific kinds of purposes. And what I want to take us through a journey of today in the talk is to think about why is this the case? Why are we seeing Woodbury Wetland and many other wetlands? Wetlands are very popular. Why are we seeing these kind of places emerging across all of our cities now, and indeed beyond the city? But my focus in today's talk will be the city. Why are we seeing nature being curated in this way? And what does that tell us about the politics of climate change, which is my main interest? I mean, it also tells us something about the politics of biodiversity, which we could talk about. But I want to think about these in relationship to climate tonight. So I'm going to do a little bit of conceptual ground clearing for those of you who are familiar with some of my work. These kind of ideas will not be unfamiliar, but they may be things that you don't necessarily agree with, and I'd be more than happy to discuss them as from the underlying kind of framework for what I'm talking about today. I want to explore with you how climate is increasingly being seen as a problem that requires that we govern with nature to realize its solution. But I am starting from a various different kinds of conceptual starting points that I won't have time to explore completely today. But I want to make it clear that I don't think of the climate problem as a singularity, but more as an evolving multiplicity, and that climate change is always necessarily attached to other things. So it's, you know, it's not a question of whether it's mitigation or adaptation, but we can see climate change attached to a set of things. I sort of just stopped at the end of the line on the slide, but I could have gone on past draft excluders and beef to think about all of the different ways in which climate change is attached to different objects, networks, and cultures that we are also part of. But what I've been interested in is how often now nature and climate out being coupled together as something that is singular, something that we can get our heads around as an entity in itself, a particular kind of coupling that I think asks a lot of questions. So that's what we're going to be looking at today. This has always intrigued me ever since I decided that working on nature based solutions would be interesting. This is an idea that myself, Kez McCormack at Lund University in Rob Robin, then at Utrecht University and now at Monash, came together around this call from the European Commission in 2050. And they were asking for projects to look at nature based solutions and look at them in cities. And we were like, this is very odd. What the hell is a nature based solution? What's going on? Why are they putting them in cities? And we were very curious about that. For me, as I explained to some of you who were there on Monday night, it gave me an opportunity to kind of reverse my thinking about climate change in cities. That always started with the question of what are cities doing about climate change? And this was a way of thinking about, well, what are cities doing and what does it matter for climate change? So it's kind of like a reverse question, which is why I was interested in it. Kez and Rob were interested in it because it was a focus on innovation with nature, which also made us intrigued and a little bit suspicious. And the kinds of things that are thought about as nature based solutions can be very many and various. And these are just a few pictures that mostly that I've taken in the last couple of years. They range from the one in Senegal is somewhere there haven't been quite a few of my colleagues are working on mangrove restoration projects in different places. But from San Francisco to Senegal, from Harvard to Durham, from Lund University through to London, nature based solutions are, as I said at the beginning, cropping up everywhere. And I think it, you know, makes us ask questions about why this kind of politics, because I think of it as a kind of politics is emerging in the city. It's going to be important to have some kind of an idea about what I'm talking about when we say nature based solutions. So I thought what we might do is share a definition that comes from the un. There's a long story behind the agreement to this definition in March 2022. If you consider what I said about the fact that I started looking at this problem in 2015. It took seven years for the UN to agree a definition of what nature based solutions are. And it's still very heavily contested. And we could talk about the politics of why the idea of nature based solutions is contested, particularly by some countries and some peoples of the Global South. But this is where the United nations have landed on what nature based solutions are. So they are actions to protect, conserve, restore, et cetera, et cetera, all of these different elements of nature, while simultaneously providing human well being, ecosystem services, resilience and biodiversity benefits. You can see there that nature's got an awful lot of work to do. It's not, you know, it's not a simple thing to solve all of these challenges at once, simultaneously. And the word simultaneously is doing a lot of important political work here. But the idea behind nature being a solution is very much that it has to have a problem that it's solving. You can have lots of nature in Durham, where I live most of the time we have a lot of nature. And most of it is not a solution to anything. It's just there, hanging out. It's been there for ages, but some of it is being now made into a solution for things like social prescribing. So GPs in the area are using this idea of social prescribing, which means that they can prescribe walks in nature as a cure for mental health, for example, and they partner with wetland organizations or with a local park to provide nature as a service for mental health well being. So that nature is perfectly, innocently, happily there by itself. And then it became a solution to a mental health problem. And it's in that institutionalization and that framing of certain things, of nature as providing certain kinds of solutions to certain people that we get this idea that nature becomes a solution. So it's in the making of it into a solution for something. And I think that's why it then of course has a politics, because it's a solution to a problem and it's a solution for some people. And it may not be a solution for everyone. But of course when we think that nature has come to be a solution, we have to ask ourselves, how did that happen? Well, we don't have to, but if we're academics, that's tend to be what we do. And I want to make the argument here that there are three main wheels that have been turning to generate nature based solutions. Not many of them have been urban. And which is then leads us to another set of questions about how we came to be thought of as urban. But I'm sure there are other ways of taking this argument. But from my perspective, these are the three kind of main things that have happened. So the way in which nature has been made into a solution. The idea that we could use it in this way is not just kind of come about. It's not like a kind of eureka moment where somebody's suddenly thought, let's use nature in this way. So I think there are three different elements of it, each of which I'm going to explain shortly. The first one is perhaps the most challenging and the one which opens up a very large can of worms. But I'm going to try to do it very quickly. For those of you who have read some of my other work, this is something that I have written about before, but this is the idea that we've moved in a way from thinking of climate change as a discrete problem of end of pipe emissions to thinking of climate change as a systemic challenge that requires the whole decarbonization of society. And that's been evident in policy and evident, I think, in the shift from Kyoto to the Paris Agreement and the ways in which we also talk about climate change. All of the different ways in which you can find the carbon footprint of your cup of coffee, your marriage, your baby, the ways in which carbon is featured in how you manage your home. Tesco is deciding to put doors on fridges was a carbon decision. All of these other ways in which carbon is becoming kind of systematically embedded into all sorts of sites and practices. That means that it's not considered only a pollution problem, but it's considered a system problem. And that changes the way in which we think about climate change. It also means that climate change comes to be attached to all sorts of different things. So that was my argument at the beginning. But once climate change is attached to all sorts of different things, it makes it easier to attach it to nature. If it was just an emissions problem at the end of pipe, or just an adaptation problem, where you implemented one thing in one place, it wouldn't have been as easy to make this coupling work. The second thing is the discourse, if you like, and institutionalized and market effects of net zero. And again, this is a longer debate than we can do here, so I'm being very brutal in my, in my take on these things. But once you decide that you're going to have net zero targets, you need something to take the carbon out of the atmosphere. You don't have that problem if you have other kinds of targets. So the whole framing of what the targets are requires some kind of offsetting through negative emissions. In the absence of viable CCs. And we can argue whether CCS is or isn't viable, we can have a lot of discussion about that. But one of the things we've seen in market terms is that forest carbon has ballooned as organizations, at least up until the early 2000s were seeking sources of negative emissions. And you can see on the slide here how much that market changed into the early 2000 and twenties. And this is some latest figures on that. Now what this figure shows you is that the market has remained relatively stable over that time. So the number of emissions credits being retired is stable. So there isn't a growth in the carbon credit market anymore. But it also shows you that the green proportion of it has kept relatively steady. And it shows you that the distinction between nature restoration and Reddit is quite significant as well. So you've had a kind of massive increase more in the nature restoration nature based solutions space than in the discrete red space overall. So while the market might not be growing still a significant proportion of it, nearly half of negative emissions carbon credits is in the green sector, in the forest sector. And that is some of that is also blue carbon actually. But nonetheless that's also driving this idea of nature based solutions. And the third thing is of course institutional. And this is work that I'm doing with Michelle Batsola and Stacey Van der Wier in a project that Michelle leads called Climate Climbio Frontiers. Climate biodiversity Frontiers and the term Frontiers will get another look in shortly. But what we see here is the development of new transnational networks which actually coincide with that shift in market logics and the shift to net zero of organizations that are starting to see seek to capitalize on governing climate and nature together. Those are some climate organizations that are moving into the biodiversity space. There are a lot of biodiversity organizations moving into the climate space and there are some organizations forming at precisely the intersection of the two. So you've got what Stacy, Michelle and I are now doing is mapping this transnational space of climate biodiversity networks. We've got about 500 so far that we're looking at. I think we feel like about 300 of them are kind of genuine transnational governance networks. But that is very much work in progress. So we'll have to wait at least until September to hear more about that. So what all of this does then. And it's also been evident in the scientific community with the joint work of the IPBES and IPCC science reports who concluded that neither climate change nor the biodiversity problem will be successful successfully resolved until both are tackled together in 2022. So we now have this sort of magical creature, sort of half real, half not real, that is the nature climate problem. That is sometimes discussed as a nexus problem, sometimes discussed as a synergy problem, sometimes discussed as co benefits, sometimes discussed as bringing sustainable development goals together. But it really is a kind of the idea that these are now have to be considered as one problem. You can't solve one without the other. So it's a kind of melding of different forces. And what Stacy, Michelle and I are doing in the climate project is trying to think of this as a kind of unsettled, unruly space of politics. A third space which Anna Singh describes as frontiers. Of course there is a lot we can say about whether the language of frontiers and its colonial heritage is a useful one. But we find that at least here we draw on post colonial scholarship, on the notions of frontiers to think about how the climate biodiversity hybrid is becoming claimable, controllable, governable, and of course amenable to improvement. So there's something about making things into a problem that matters for how it then becomes amenable, how it's legible, what kind of a problem is it and what does that mean for the sorts of solutions we should be looking for? What I want to argue is that nature based solutions are really useful here. They provide really useful frontier objects. They're translation devices. They make things practical. It's possible for you to think of nature based solutions as a translation object or even an obligatory passage point for people who find themselves drawn to that way of thinking by which the nature and climate hybridity is made actually amenable to intervention. So all of these different things, which, many of which have existed for a long time before nature based solutions became an umbrella term, ecosystem services, green spaces, they've existed for ages, parks hundreds of years, green and blue infrastructure, slightly less blue, but nonetheless that term has been around. Nature based adaptation has been around since the World bank was working with that in the 2000s at least, and of course ecosystem services since the late 1990s, all of these things are now kind of bundled together as objects that help us to navigate this hybridity. It was only this week that I realized that the beaver was anything to do with lse. I know I'm very poorly educated, but we have a fascination with beavers in our Naturescapes project because they keep turning up and being celebrated in places where they shouldn't be. So we're excited about that. But here the beavers of course, are doing ongoing work to keep things the same. So that's why I like beavers as related to problematizing activity. You might think that once we have a problem or an issue like climate change is kind of settled, we all know what it is, but actually you have to keep it going. You have to always be working on keeping it a problem. And so that's why nature based solutions are quite useful, because you're always intervening with nature based solutions to keep everybody on track with the fact that this hybridity is a problem. So what the beavers are doing here, and what a lot of political actors try to do, is to stabilize problems so that we can find solutions to them. That's how policy proceeds. You bring it to order through, through frames and practices which align different objects and subjects together and allow you then to achieve what you consider to be progress. Okay, so so far so good. We're all on board with what nature based solutions. I'm sure you will have questions and different ideas about what I've just said, but I want to turn from that kind of big picture of what I think is happening in terms of how nature based solutions have come to be understood as a discourse and as a global practice to think about what's happening in the city. And here I'm going to share some of the work that we've been doing together in these projects that I've mentioned. So to start with, and this is kind of one of the puzzles that we had when we started the Nature of Ocean project. The idea that what you want in a city is more nature is a bit counterintuitive, right? I mean, the modernist idea of the city tried to, like, evacuate nature from cities, tried to get rid of water, hide it underneath the ground. If we're going to have nature is very carefully curated into public parks. Any kind of wildness wasn't really, you know, what we were after with a kind of modernist planning approach. So for a long time we thought of cities as the opposite to nature. And there's a lot of discussion about that. I'm sure historians and humanities scholars in the room could tell us much more about that. But what has now transpired is that at least over the last decade, we've seen a return to the idea that nature bringing nature back into the city is a way of saving the city from itself. So it's a way in which we can kind of cure the city's ills by making them more natural again. There's all sorts of reasons why that could be the case. Nature in cities, physically calls cities and heat is a significant challenge. Of course it manages water, it can increase biodiversity, it can generate urban gardens, produce food. There's all sorts of things that nature does, really do in the city. I'm not trying to say that it's all made up, but it's intriguing that we think that that should be something that happens inside the city and that it's nature who should be providing that to the city rather than other forms of infrastructure, which is what we've done for like the last four or five hundred years. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell.
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Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Now, you've heard me saying some of these things before, and this is kind of like a bit of a conceptual note. What I'm going to say next is again about how I'm understanding what I mean by governing here, which is very much a kind of social, material reading of governance. So I'm not going to talk about governance and power. I'm not only talking about actors and individuals and institutions, but that's why I'm particularly interested in the kind of material interventions that we make in cities. When we put nature into cities, when we build flood protection in particular ways, those are expressions of power and also generative of power, power as they bring new actors and constellations together in different ways and allow for the way the world is organized to be thought of differently. So for me, accomplishing governance then is not only about how you think about the problem as fields of intervention, but how you actually socially and materially reconfigure them. And in this process, both state and non state actors play roles. They all have components, capacities to authoritatively exercise power. So it's not only the state who has power and authority, and they can steer other others. And they all have different ideas about what improvement might mean. And this is of course, why we get contestation, because for some people, improving the city will be able to be retaining water within the city. But for others, that is not an improvement, because then there's lots of mosquitoes, there's disease health risk. So ideas of improvement, of course, are deeply held and also contested. But why I'm interested in this and in this conceptual sort of slight side route to what I'm just about to talk about is because particularly important in the urban arena over the last two decades has been the role of experimentation as a means through which power and authority and the governing of cities become climate change has emerged. I have quite a lot I could say about experimentation. It's something that I talk about quite a bit. But what I'm interested in is how experimentation works as a means of reconfiguring social material relationships. So it allows previously separate and unconnected elements to be aligned to one another. And it is a strategic effect. It has a strategic effect. And so from my perspective, I think of experimentation as a means of governing, not just a means of innovation or learning. And so that is also important to know in terms of what I'm just about to talk to you about. So what we did in the naturevation project is we looked at a thousand different urban nature experiments in 100 different cities across Europe. The team did say, are you sure it has to be a thousand? Such a good number. We're definitely going to get the money. We say we're going to do a thousand things. This is all of the thousand cases we looked at was all from secondary data. We then went and looked at about 100 things in much more detail on the ground across six 12 different cities in Europe. But these are some of the interesting things that we found. So all of the nature based solutions and you can find this is all in something which we call the Urban Nature Atlas and it's online. So if you're interested in finding a thousand different examples of urban nature based solutions globally, now we've extended it globally, which I'll tell you a bit about in a minute, you can find it. It's very easily searchable by the SDGs or by particular cities or regions or countries. We found it's a really good resource for working with students. You can. Yeah, it's just a really, I would say this wouldn't like, but it is a really great data set and lots of different organizations around the world are using it for ideas and inspiration. But what we found in the Urban Nature Atlas work is that every urban nature solution that we looked at was addressing at least three problems. They were all really doing this work of simultaneously. So they were all really doing that. But Most importantly, only 14% of them were only looking at environmental issues. Nature based solutions, when they're being implemented in European cities were primarily being done for social and economic purpose alongside environmental purpose. And that was quite surprising. It was quite surprising to us and it was quite surprising to the European Commission that we could see such a strong role for health, regeneration, economic development. In the nature based solutions that we were looking at, we saw a relative high correlation, as it says, between the aims and the actual impacts that were delivered in these projects. But one of the most curious things that we found is that projects tended to do more than they thought they initially could do. So they tended to maybe start with a smaller number, like between three and six different kinds of sustainable development challenges they wanted to work on. But as they progressed, they actually added more challenges. It was like this kind of idea of doing things together became a culture of ways of working through nature in the city. So they might have started off saying this is a health green space project and it might have some regeneration or economic development benefits. And then they would suddenly kind of think, oh well, is this a climate, can we do something about climate in this project as well? So they kind of accreted more different goals over time, which we found very interesting because it really shows that this kind of idea that nature should be a solution had really taken on. Right. So they were like, well, we're solving these three problems. What's to stop us? Like world peace is next. We're going for all of the problems that we can find. So we think that's quite an interesting logic about projects and not something that you necessarily find with gray infrastructure projects. I don't tend to do the same thing. So that we thought was something particular that I wanted to share with you. And now in the project that we're working on now, which we call Naturescapes, we're working at an urban regional level. So rather than just looking at the city itself, we're looking at city and its regional setting. And that means that we're looking both in urban areas, but the rural hinterland and also marine coastal areas as well. Naturescapes has a lovely website, as you can see, some really fantastic art drawn by our colleague at Lund University. And the place is which are on this map, which are in dark, those are the places where we are working on the ground with partners and with the research teams. The others we're doing through a combination of ecological data and secondary social science data. And so this is what if you were to go now to the Urban Nature Atlas, you would find some of our Naturescapes projects there as well. And these are the kind of questions that we're asking now is about when. Now that we have so many nature based solutions being implemented at once, how are they interacting with one another? What new kinds of landscapes or Naturescapes are being created through the multiplicity of nature based solutions being implemented at once? Do they actually start to do worse in environmental performance because they could confound one another? So you've got upstream and downstream issues, you've got neighbourhood issues. You might be like increasing property prices in one part of the city and impoverishing other parts of the city, which, you know, if you kind of load lots of urban parks and greening into one part, do you actually compound the effect of gentrification that we've seen elsewhere around single projects? So unfortunately we're halfway through. So I don't have all the answers to you here. Some of the projects you can look at, but we can't necessarily. Yes, so, but I think what we can say at the moment at least, is that we see that some of these projects are being purposefully designed together, but not all of them. So some of them now there are kind of strategic attempts, both by community actors and by state led actors to tie these different projects together into new kind of naturescapes. The most obvious ones are those related to water. So in Berlin, for example, we have the sponge city network, we have the sponge city project which is doing multiple different interventions to make Berlin spongier. And that's an idea borrowed from Chinese cities, which is quite interesting. We also have coastal areas in the cities where multiple different projects are happening along a coastline to try to protect the coastline. So you have some strategic intent to bring nature based solutions together, but we can't say for sure whether that strategic intent is providing actual benefits. So. But we hope to be able to do so by the end of the project. But here's an example from Detroit of work that my colleague Anouk Fransen has done looking at the whole idea of greenways and the way in which greenways were developed to provide a new kind of social infrastructure for health, recreation, biodiversity in the city. And also to try to encourage modal shift away from the car in of course the city. That is the history of the coal. And Anouka has been looking at how these different ideas of greenways are imagined, the different groups involved in them, but all of the kind of mapping and configuration that's gone into thinking of Detroit now as a kind of cycling and walking city, which is quite hard work in a city like Detroit. And so this is just an example to show you how there's a lot of different places, projects that are going on, but then you have a greenway movement led by a coalition of different actors to try to bring those projects into relationship with one another. And some of those things are here. So that's just an example of the more strategic attempts that we've seen to actually try to build new landscapes connecting Nature based solutions at scale across urban regions. So that's just a bit of a kind of empirical look at the kinds of projects that we're looking at on the ground. And I hope that's given you a flavor for the kinds of things that nature based solutions are and that can do on the ground. But one of the most important questions for us is the extent to which working with nature in cities actually leads to change that we could regard as in some sense transformative. And this is also connected to a broader question about whether any kinds of interventions that happen at a kind of experimental scale can be transformed. And that is no doubt a question that I'm going to debate with the rest of the world until I stop working on this issue. Two main questions are always posed to those of us who think that experimentation can be transformative. The first is that experimentation is too slow. And the second is that it's too fragmented in the face of the urgent challenges we face for climate and nature. And I mean, you look possibly be able to work out what my answers are to those questions from the images here. I mean, an oak takes a very long time to grow. It doesn't mean that it's not transformative. Right. Unless anybody wants to contest the mighty oak. But oaks can be incredibly transformative of both the natural systems of which they're in and also of social relations around them. Of course, mushrooms are pretty fragmented ecology on the one hand, but also deeply connected when you look underground. So the question about what is too slow and what is too fragmented for change, what kind of change are we expecting and how. I think it's not something we should take for granted. But I am obviously prepared to discuss this further in terms of what does experimentation actually do in relationship to the pace it change that we need? One of the things, things we've been trying to do in the project, and we've just had a paper published in the autumn on this idea of transformative change is to think beyond a kind of one size fits all model. What we're observing in policy and to some extent in practice is that transformative change is usually figured as something which is of one scale and one speed. It has to be fast, has to be urgent, and it has to be large. And when every, when you say, see people talking about transformative change in those terms, it's always worth just pausing for a minute and thinking, okay, well that may be true because of the problem that we're facing. But whose hands are then on the levers of power for transformative change? If it can only be rapid, urgent and fast. There are only a few kinds of actors who can achieve that kind of change. And they're always very happy to tell you that they're being transformative on something. But one of the things that it does is it negates the agency of many other actors who may be undertaking things which are transformative. And so, following the sort of debate that's going on in the literature on these things, we in the project take on board the idea that transformative change can be across systems, it can be addressed at structures, so the deep social, cultural, political orders that we inhabit, or it can be about enabling agency. We also also take from the ipbes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, their conclusions from the Transformative Change Report, that this change can happen through our views and values, through our structures or institutions, and through our practices. And importantly the IPBES Global Assessment Report, which is like a kind of IPCC report but for biodiversity. What they said is the character of its quality and direction of change that matters, rather than its speed and scale. And they do this specifically to make enough space for community action for indigenous peoples, action for action at the urban scale as well. So that's how we've been thinking about transformative change. But we've also been very mindful of the fact that when you're working with nature in cities, your kind of automatic senses, it's a good thing. And this work from Hilary d' Angelo Hughes made the argument that she has a fantastic book for those of you who are interested in diving in more about how the idea of the green city became good. So she talks about the way in which values around nature have been embedded into urban planning and practice over more than 150 years. And she takes Germany as the case in which works. But she asked us very clearly to think about how nature had been constructed as universally beneficial investment for the public good, and asking us to consider who it is for whom things are actually good. So it's not only a matter of thinking about whose interests are served, but thinking about how governing biome with nature based solutions is actually reshaping what we think good urban. What is good practice? What does it mean to inhabit a good city? So while we're kind of drawn to the idea of transformative change, we also want to have a critical approach to that, to put these questions of justice front and center. So for us, transformative change has always got to be something which takes seriously the matter of justice and takes seriously this idea that we don't want to Have a kind of nature based solution, washing of cities. But green is necessarily always good. And even if it may be transformative in speed, scale and urgency, if it's not just, then it cannot be transformative from our perspective. And anyway, maybe I will just skip this because this is just a little bit mechanical about how we're doing that. But I wanted to get to some of our initial analysis and this was work that we like. This is work in progress and we kind of finalized an internal report on this about a week and a half ago. So very much work in progress led by my colleague JJ at Utrecht with also working with Anouk. So of the 72 case studies that we're looking at in depth in this part of the analysis, we suggested that 42 of them meet the criteria for transformative change. So that is change that is either systemic, structural or about agency and enabling and that it has a root of justice at its. So about, you know, a bit more than half, which is not bad going considering that we didn't choose them on those grounds. They were selected for other reasons. And then what we've been trying to do is also think about, well, how does the dynamic of change work then? So these have the potential to be trained to be transformative, but are they? Do they have a dynamic that will actually lead them to be? And so we've been looking at these three different kinds of dynamics and again, I could talk to you about it more, but we see amplification, destabilization and experimentation as different dynamics that are happening around nature based solutions that are allowing for transformative change to be realized. Now, I think importantly here is this one of destabilization. It's been something that's been long. I mean the other two are quite well known in the field. But destabilization has been long talked about, but maybe not so much evidence for it, which is what do we have to undo and let go of to enable transformative change? So what we see is that in where it's possible to. And maybe something like, yeah, so you may have to, for example, forego a really easy traffic route to put in more land to nature. And you may have to undo the idea that the value of transport infrastructure is in how fast you can get from A to B in a car. So that might be something that's an undoing of something. Right? It's an undoing of a cultural norm and it's an undoing of a standard infrastructure project. That's what I mean by the undoing. So the destabilization could be also political, could be through protest and contestation. But I think this is quite interesting dynamic to show that when nature based solutions can be transformative, they also can involve destabilization as well as amplification and experimentation, which are dynamics that we've seen before. So to conclude, I just wanted to sort of reflect a little bit on what I think this means for the ways in which we understand and do our research. And this is also, this is a bit of a tantalizing discussion on Monday, which is that governing with nature provides all sorts of kind of inherent consciousness. It's too slow, but it's also necessary to go that slowly. It's fragmented and contested, it is unjust, but also can be just. And so that it of course is not a silver bullet. I mean, we know that. But I think one of the things those of us working on issues of climate change find really difficult is inhabit that area of ambivalence, to know that things can be both good and bad at the same time, that we can have potential for change. Things can be potentially transformative, but may not be realized. How do we actually inhabit that without turning to trying to control nature? So the idea often is to get rid of the ambivalence. What we need to do is we need to survey nature more, we need to know it more, we need to have more indicators, we need to monitor it more. And then there's more knowledge that we have and more control over nature we have, the better the nature space solution will be. But actually it's inherent in working with nature that it has ambivalence. Nature based solutions that are supposed to manage flood waters around London, you know, they may be not able to cope with the January and February 2026. Right, but does that mean that they failed? When will they be successful? When are they failing? The nature is itself cyclical and inherently seasonal. It doesn't have that sort of securitization or control that we might want. And I think that that then speaks back to a whole other way of thinking about how do we live with climate change under ambivalence, which means that we're not actually going to be able to control how successful we are in addressing it. And that may be challenging for us to think about. We can do a lot to get there, but there will always be something about it which is out of rock control. And for me this is holiday conceptual matter, as you might imagine. But for me this is because these kind of situations and the situations in which experimentation takes place are always indeterminate. You can move forward in some degree, but they're always situations that are open because we're working in an open situation with multiple different things in flux. And so rather than trying to create solutions here, we need different forms of inquiry which continually ask us to open up the problem that has been created before us and think about the different ways which we can intervene to make some steps forward. And I really like this cartoon because, you know, this is this kind of thing like, okay, if we only knew exactly where we were going and we could only control how we get there, we'd end up in paradise. And the kind of, you know, what I'm trying to suggest is that rather than working with a kind of sat nav approach to navigating our way through the climate crisis, we need more of a compass that provides a sense of direction to us, the principles that we want to follow. The idea, for example, of a just future, but doesn't give us only one pathway through which to get there. Thank you very much.
- [45:12]
B
Thank you so much. That was extremely rich. We're going to open it up to questions. If you're online, please type your questions into the Q and A box and that will kind of get pushed through to me here. For those of you here in the room, please wait to ask your question until you have been acknowledged and the roving microphone gets to you. Yes, right here.
- [45:42]
A
Hi there. Thank you for the talk. I'm a student with the Sociology department. I was wondering, well, I like that you emphasize uncertainty and ambivalence. How do you sell that to policymakers that are not used to it? Yeah, very much a pragmatic question, I guess. Yeah. Do you want me to go for one at a time? Yeah. It's interesting, that question. There's one thing about how do you sell nature based solutions is ambivalent and uncertain, which is one. I'll go down that route first and then maybe I'll say something more broadly about uncertainty and ambivalence. And I'm going to do this with an anecdote about a nature based solution in Newcastle, which was part of what we looked at in our first project. There's a small tributary to the Tyne in Newcastle called the Ouseburn. And it's a very flashy river. So it like looks completely dry and then it rains somewhere in the Cheviots and then suddenly it's completely wet. And this is a very difficult river to manage in the city. And so all sorts of different things have been tried to manage this river and the water company and the environment. Agency, the plans were all trying to work out how to put in a new like large concrete plant, pump and etc. Etc. Basically there's no room along the used bend for, for this. The amount of kit that they would need to put in to fit the kit size has changed because of climate predictions the environment Agency has to make. You know, the change in what 100 year flood is means that they had to build more and more kit and more and more concrete and they just couldn't find the space for it. And so then they realized that the only thing they could do was nature based solutions along the river. And in a sense it was the climate driver of the fact that they had to acknowledge that climate was making things both more certain there's going to be flooding at this level and more uncertain at the same time, which meant that they had to have a kind of solution that also matched that ambivalence. And so in those situations where climate has been a sufficient driver to realize that our fixed infrastructural ways of doing things are no longer working, then the ambivalence can be welcomed to a certain degree. Then I got, you know, ensuring it, risk testing it, you know, all of those things very difficult to do. So I think that's, that's, you know, that's where nature based solutions, it's when the ambivalence is useful that they actually can work. Selling more broadly the idea that things are ambivalent and uncertain around climate change is extremely difficult. But that's why all of the nature based solutions that we've seen are selling themselves on something else that is certain. So they sell themselves on, on the well being, you know, and you cannot move for studies of how well being is improved by being in nature these days. I don't know if you've noticed that, but The Guardian and Radio 4 and probably many other publications that I don't read are always carrying stories about, well, being in nature now. Right. And also things like clean air. The things that we can be certain about are always, always attached to the things we can't be certain about. Hello. Hello, My name is Cara, I'm a political economy student here with dlse. Thank you for this transformative talk. However, I'm kind of a slave to my disciplinary thinking. So I was wondering, how are these.
- [49:00]
B
Projects financed and who bears the cost?
- [49:03]
A
And second, I was wondering what are your thoughts on ecosystem service valuations or putting a monetary value on an ambivalent nature? Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, there is a very big debate about how these things are paid for and particularly how they should be paid for. So at the moment most nature based solutions are paid for through state based funding. So in the European context or North American context, most of them are paid for by local authority or national governments. Something like 90% of nature based solutions are funded by the state. And in cities in the global south, many are funded through like multilateral donation. So yeah, so one of my students, Katerina Rochelle, has been working on nature based solutions in sub Saharan African cities. And we see that most of it is coming through donor funding, some concessional loans and some aids and also like philanthropic funding. So they're really different geographically how they're funded. Everybody thinks there should be more private sector funding involved. They think the state should go into kind of de risking mode. So you should de risk the ambivalence of nature through state based funding, which is, you know, a whole sort of questions there that open up of course, what I think. So that's the first question about how they're funded and who thinks how they think it should be funded. What do I think about putting a monetary value on nature? I think many things about it because I think it's the, what is it within nature that you are putting the monetary value on that matters. So if you're putting the monetary value on the possibility of a SUD system to reduce the risk to Yorkshire water of Barnsley flooding, and that means that Yorkshire water are going to pay farmers to put land aside into water management, then I think probably that's okay. But if we're going to put the value on, you know, the last cornflower growing in Yorkshire with a monetary value, then maybe that's different. And so one of the things that we do in these projects is we think about the layering of value and keeping different kinds of values distinct and financing some of them in some ways and others others having to still be public goods.
- [51:29]
B
Let's go back here.
- [51:31]
A
So since the world is rapidly urbanizing, how scalable do you think nature based solutions actually are? And when do you think they'll reach their limits? When, when will they reach their limits? Yes. So what extent do you think they can go up to before they reach a limit? That's a really interesting question. Thank you very much. The rapidly urbanizing part of the question is leads to. What I'm thinking about is competition over land. So while in many existing city, in many stabilized urban areas, we are bringing nature back into space. Cities, of course, in many rapidly growing cities, peri urban land is being turned over into more urban Infrastructure and housing. And so what have been considered like a wetland area may be being drained and reconsidered for housing and land and infrastructure. So it's definitely not a one way picture of how nature based solutions are being implemented. So that idea of the land value and how land value is taken into account is really important in all of this question. The scalability question is a little bit different because nature based solutions can come in all sorts of different scales. Large scale urban green infrastructure for flood protection and things of this kind. Of course we've seen many Chinese cities go for that large scale urban green infrastructure approach as they are also rapidly expanding. So they've done the two things together. But out of that, that is related to multiple different kinds of issues about planning and politics and also ideology around nature in the Chinese context, which is very rare to see anywhere else. So I don't think we would see the Chinese model of urban development, nature based solutions elsewhere anytime soon. But in terms of how far they can scale up, it really does depend about how much urban land is available and where, and also whether you're talking about retrofitting nature into existing spaces. So there's a lot of European cities, for example, interested in de paving, so taking up pavement, taking up parking lots, taking up where we've kind of unculverting rivers. That's very trendy at the moment, getting rivers out of concrete, very hot. So there's space to bring back nature into some of those small parts of European cities. Thank you for the question.
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B
I'm going to take a question from online. It's a long question so I'm going to bridge it slightly.
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A
I do long answers so we should be fine.
- [54:00]
B
This is from Isabel Santana from Mexico, a prospective applicant. I don't know why perspective just apply and we have great things going on here. Obviously in many Latin American cities, nature based solutions are framed as delivering climate adaptation and social benefits. Yet urban development often fragments habitats and reproduces socioecological inequalities both among human communities where rights are deeply affected and across species. If governing with nature is to be truly transformative, how can governance frameworks ensure that these interventions genuinely enhance habitats and biodiversity, avoid reinforcing elite capture or green gentrification and move beyond human centered development logics to recognize animals, the of nature ecosystems as political subjects with legitimate claims to space and survival?
- [54:50]
A
That is a really long and also very good question. I think the answer is that probably it can't do all of those things all at the same time everywhere, but that there are examples of where that can happen, and that is also true in Latin American cities. So two of the places that we're working in in the Naturescapes project are in Latin America. One is Cartagena in Colombia and one is Lima in Peru. And so our methodology in the project is that we look at 25 different sites across the urban region. And so we, that's why we can then see how they're being connected to one another and what the strategic importance of that is. And I've done a little bit of the work in Cartagena myself. Only was there for like two, ten days with, with the project team, but we, we did a lot of work around the projects in the lagoon in that time. And one of the things that we can see is that where you allow multiple different kinds of societal actors to come into the space of decision making, they bring with them different values and ideas about which kinds of species and which forms of nature are really important to them. And that is a way of actually kind of democratizing the space and having different kind of views of, and values of nature and different species accounted for in decision making processes. It doesn't mean that the conflicts between the actors go away, but at least you know that you've got different kinds of values for nature in the room when you're both doing the research and also fostering dialogue and trying to get a debate happening. The Cartagena lagoon is very, it's a very challenging and interesting space. It is not. Yeah, it's not very well managed for nature at the moment. But there's a whole set of communities who've decided no longer to build incrementally into the lagoon. They were taking out the mangroves to build housing in informal settlements. And this was mainly driven by the migration into the city that happened during the drug wars period in Colombia. But the communities have decided together between themselves to self police building the informal housing into the lagoon instead. Started to do work around valuing different bird species, thinking about living alongside birds and fish and different other animals, which I can't remember all of them in the lagoon as a means of both improving the ecology. They're growing more food in that area now they're selling some of their indigenous herbs, I think is the right word to use into markets in, in the city center. So they've been able to kind of work out a way in which this kind of working alongside nature is also providing new forms of economic development for them in this area. So I think that, you know, and this is then being funded and sponsored as a kind of mangrove restoration project by others now coming in to what communities had already started. So I think there are ways of aligning external interest with what communities are already doing is one of the ways in which some of that can be done rather than coming in with nature based solutions projects that don't account for that already. That was a long answer, but it was a difficult question. So I hope, Isabelle, that was interesting for you. Thanks for the question.
- [58:12]
B
Up here.
- [58:14]
A
And then there's one at the back. Nearly. You were nearly there. Hello. Thank you for the presentation so far. So at the beginning you mentioned that Woodbury Wetlands was a sort of big example of a typical sort of nature based solution that we often see a lot of wetland restoration projects, perhaps because the, the value is easy to articulate, they're large scale. But I was curious if you, you could expand a bit on underserved NBS projects and what sort of initiatives maybe should get more attention or underappreciated at the minute. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So yeah, I mean if colleagues who work on wetlands would hear that wetlands are underappreciated, don't forget the wetlands. But wetlands are, wetlands are valuable because you can easily also account for the carbon. So you can trade the carbon in them in a way that. So you can monetize them, which is back to your question about monetization. So it's those nature based solutions which are hardest to monetize, which are receiving the least attention and those tend to be fragmented. So they tend to be, in any one of them is small scale and they tend to have either a long term benefit or a benefit that's very diffuse. So like a fragmented nature based solution that does get valued is community gardens because the values and benefits are immediate and those communities around them are invested in maintaining them. But perhaps we're thinking about more neglected areas of cities which are just kept in the kind of bland nature that they have already, like railway sidings, canals, verges, roundabouts, all of these kind of places which are just kind of nothing spaces where but if added up together you did something with them to make them kind of spongier or more biodiverse, they could form interesting wildlife corridors. They could make a significant difference. I don't know how many, like now when I walk around the city, like every time I see a puddle I'm like, hang on a second. Like if we've done a little gully here with some nice flowers, things be different. So it's all those kind of like the micro spaces. Some cities are really taking that on Board. I mean, Paris is the kind of iconic example of this, where the Parisian plan for nature based solutions was about micro interventions and particularly around schools. So the idea that every, on your way to every primary school you should encounter some nature. And most primary schools in Paris is a very dense city, so people are not walking very far. So either the schoolyard or the route to school should be greens. And they've done multiple, multiple, multiple micro interventions and, and that has made quite a significant difference. And they have their kind of figures on that. So. So it's possible to do, but you have to have a lot of political will and money, I guess.
- [61:12]
B
And. Yes, back here.
- [61:15]
A
Thank you. I'm Leandro, I'm a current student of the Master's in Environmental development. In lse. You showed us this definition that was embraced by the United nations about nature based solutions. But before that, many organizations have been working. One of them, iucn, also proposed even a global standard and different criteria to catalog what a nature based solution project is. I was wondering if the urban Nature Atlas projects are aligned with the United nations definition, with IUCN's global standard, or if they have their own criterion to catalog these nature based solutions. And what are your thoughts on these different typologies different organizations have created? Thank you very much. That's a really interesting question. It's. Well, as soon as, if you're interested in environmental policy and politics and governance and as soon as you see multiple standards, you think, yes, this is a politically contested area because otherwise there wouldn't be multiple standards going on. So the IUCN came up with its standard for nature based solutions probably around about 2020 or just before. And the idea was that if anybody can remember 2020 before what you can all remember 2024, I actually partially hold myself responsible for the pandemic because in January 2020 I bought a T shirt which said 2020 on it in gold. And this was because it was supposed to be a golden year for the environment, because it was a climate convention and a biodiversity convention meeting in the same year, which was supposed to bring these two issues together. Saw the T shirt, bought the T shirt pandemic happened, no global governance. So sorry for that, but the IUCN developed the standard for that, for that golden year of environment for climate in nature. That's why they developed the standard. And the difference between the IUCN standard and the United nations definition is really about level of detail and precision. And the United nations definition went through a whole host of really quite significant negotiations. Many countries in the global south and many indigenous peoples groups and movements are very against the term nature based solutions. They have the phrase our nature is not your solution. It kind of really tells you why they're against it. The idea that the global north would be able to sort of colonize again natural areas in the Global south and claim them as a solution to the problems of the north is obviously something that is highly contested. And so what the UNEA definition tried to do was to move away from such an ecological focus as the IUCN have to more of a kind of social purpose focus and more tying nature based solutions into the SDGs. And when we started doing the Urban Nature Atlas, our kind of approach was to think about urban nature solutions as solutions if they meet sustainable development goals. So that was just pragmatic for us because we were like, well, nobody's defined it yet. What should we do? Okay, well we got a whole system of sustainable development goals that have been accepted and are practiced and known at multiple levels and by lots of different actors. So we'll use those. So the then we are kind of broadly aligned to what Yoneta said.
- [64:45]
B
I'm going to take another question from online. This is from Jeannie in Buckingham. We are farmers in Suffolk. We grow with nature and we are constantly learning through doing what we find works. Is the involvement of local people in growing food. For instance, with Pig Club, Bee and Veg clubs, should we be giving local people more involvement in nature based issues such as flooding, clean water and organic local food because people must be part of nature based solutions and become committed through citizen science involvement?
- [65:18]
A
Yes. I really agree with Jeannie and I'm very intrigued by Pig Club. I want to know more about Pig Club. I think this sounds fantastic and I think this is one of the reasons why urban nature based solutions have come to be so popular among small, multiple different kinds of actors and organizations because they offer a tangible way in which people can start to feel like they actually have some agency in addressing problems that otherwise can seem so very big and so far away. Right? I mean, if you are concerned about climate change or you're even just concerned about your neighborhood and what your neighborhood looks like, working with nature in the city can really make you feel like you're able to make a difference. So you see lots of those things happening. The citizen science part is really interesting. I'm glad that Jeanne asked that because we have a nice new little guide to citizen science coming out from our Naturescapes project. But what we're really interested in doing there is we think the citizens knowledge and citizens engagement with nature based solutions is really valuable. But what we want to do is broaden the idea of knowledge. So it's not only citizens doing science for other people that matters. Which often citizen science projects can be a bit kind of instrumentalized and say, this is the kind of knowledge we want. We're the kind of scientists. We know what kind of knowledge about nature is best. Could you guys all go out and collect it for us and then give it back to us? And what we've really found to work is where citizens own knowledge about nature is able to be brought together with science. So this might be like observation about citizens who are able to say, well, what I've noticed is about the trees in my neighborhood this year is that their leaves are falling much earlier. And then they could. Then there's a kind of discussion, did that mean that they needed more watering and they hadn't been watered properly? Should there be a different, you know, how do we adapt to what's happening in the environment around us? So that sort of using that intuitive knowledge that a lot of people have about the nature that they live beside all the time and making also, of course, space for indigenous natural knowledge and knowledge from other groups, you know, also spiritual knowledge. Yeah. So we think there's a bigger. There's definitely a role for drawing on different kinds of knowledges to support working with nature. And it is a way of engaging the communities. I don't know if any of you know the project that the Natural History Museum in London have done with their urban nature garden. So the Natural History Museum have remade their co gardens at their museum property in Kensington. But with that, they're also doing lots of work on outreach on urban gardens across the whole of London. And it's that kind of extending what they are doing into the community, but bringing the community into the garden across London, which. It's that kind of model of knowledge exchange which seems to be really useful. Hi, Harry, thank you so much for your gentleman generosity across the week. It's meant a great deal to us. I wondered if you could speak to us a little bit about the politics of air. Politics of air. And particularly in relation to how pernicious its effects are. I mean, it physiologically affects all of us who have to move through cities. And it kind of sets. Sits as an elemental concern alongside a terrifically powerful petrochemical set of lobbyists, as well as a kind of incentivization always to resort to the car.
- [68:47]
B
Thank you.
- [68:49]
A
Yeah, thank you. I think the relationship between nature and air is really interesting. A couple of different things. Like first Thoughts here. One concern that people have about some kinds of nature based solutions is that they can actually increase air pollutants. So depending on the kind of nature that you're talking about, they can, they can trap pollutants and then re release them. And also they can generate allergens. And so taking account of the sorts of nature that you are bringing into the city and how it mixes into the environment that you have is really critical and often not really done very well. And that leads me to a little bit back to Isabel's question about the different kinds of species and how we work with multiple species. And we often also get asked in the project, well, what about the bits of nature that we don't like very much? Should we be introducing those as well? And here maybe some of the nature based solutions will actually serve to exacerbate air pollution problems that we need to kind of call consider that. On the other hand, one of the things that we do see, and this is true in many of the southern European cities which we've worked in, is that using nature to generate cool corridors for walkability and other forms of mobility has been really successful. And many cities in Spain are doing this, and also in Italy and a little bit in Greece, I'm looking at not quite so much, but, but the provision of shade and what nature does for shade in urban areas is absolutely crucial, but increasingly under pressure in hotter cities. So we are really at risk of losing our shade. So we're really at risk of exacerbating the kind of petrochemical transport through the city. The more shade that we lose, the more likely we are to drive. And so, so how come this requires a lot of really significant challenges and the city that I know best, where these have been at the fore in terms of the politics of air, heat and shade is Melbourne in Australia. So Melbourne is increasingly experiencing really hot days. Its tree population is not really surviving that. The tree population in Melbourne is mainly a Victorian England tree population. When a Aboriginal landscapes were cleared to make room for settler colonialism, Aboriginal tree species are likely also not to survive. So what kind of nature do you build into the city to survive multiple plus 40 degrees, and to keep the city livable in and walkable in and cyclable in. Do you kind of deny the Aboriginal past to bring in multiple exotic invasive species? What do you, you know, do you lose your, your heritage with a Victorian city? It's a really, really challenging question on all sorts of fronts. But it's obviously not only in Australian cities that that's going to be addressed. Many German cities are also going through this now and are having to have new kind of tree plans for the city of. So we should think that the trees that we have now are not fixed parts of our cities. But we need to kind of consider what kind of urban tree features we want and how we do that. And I think so for me it's the relationship between shade tree. Not all shade comes from trees, of course it can come from other nature based solutions. Shade trees, air quality, pollutants, pollens, that whole kind of mixtures really refiguring the kind of volumetric space of the city, I guess.
- [72:36]
B
Okay, I have more questions online. This actually picks up on something you were saying earlier about Paris. Perhaps this is from Anissa. Transformative change often requires shifting power dynamics. How can governance models evolve to ensure that children as active agents rather than passive beneficiaries are included in the co production of nature based solutions? And what role does their localized emotional connection to nature play in making these solutions sustainable?
- [73:08]
A
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Again, gosh. So I mean I'm not going to. When I say it's not interesting question, probably not, but it really is getting me thinking, I think. I'm not sure how much the governance models can change. And children of course come in multiple forms and ages. So there's a difference between working with youth and working with very small children. But I think what we can think about are so educational establishments, but also other sites which are orientated around youth. So this is like sports clubs, leisure centres, schools, colleges, museums, cultural institutions of all different kinds. So they all have a role already in shaping how we grow up in relationship to nature. They will already shape our understanding about nature and how we interact with the natural world. But many of them are increasingly thinking about how they can do that in a more proactive way. And so schools in Paris is not the only school project. New York has also an amazing one. But many schools are now changing their hours to make their schoolyards available outside of school time and to the wider community and are de paving it and are greening them. So if you are, you know, part of a school community, who hasn't thought about that yet? And people in your neighborhood don't have very much access to nature and your school community could think about doing lumps and something like that. Just, you know, a small Parisian revolution in a part of London. It's never a bad thing. So you know, thinking of it through, through that lens, the. Yeah, UNEP also has a Nature a sport for nature Program where lots of sports clubs globally are also trying to engage with this idea of all of the land that they have. And in Dublin, which is one of the other cases where we're working colleagues have been working with a Gaelic football community, which I never thought would be one of the stakeholders that I end up working with on climate change, but apparently Gaelic football, you need a very large football pitch to play Gaelic football on. And you. There's also a lot of land around these pitches which is currently just being sort of mown. So there's a whole kind of idea about how could that land be used, could it be used for tree planting, food growing orchards? So there's a new kind of discussion happening around what's the role for those kind of land holders. And sports clubs are big landholders in that regard. There's apparently also a multi species hotel in a golf course near London. I think it's in Anfield, I think there's a golf course which has been. This is just. This is a rumor from one of my colleagues in Durham who does work on beavers. But he, he told me that, he told me this so, and I believe a lot of what he tells me, but I have yet to actually verify it, that there's a golf course on the edge of London that has changed from being about golf to being about species. And you can kind of go on a little safari, go and stay in the hotel and like see animals. I don't know whether it's true, but it sounds good. So.
- [76:07]
B
Sounds like a great field trip.
- [76:08]
A
Sounds like a great field trip. I'm gonna have to know. I've got to look that up because it would be a great answer to many questions. Right. I'm gonna look up the multi species hotel. If somebody else finds it first, that I encourage you to see whether it's actually true. Is Johnny talking the truth about this?
- [76:25]
B
Yes. Back here. Hi.
- [76:28]
A
In India, we had Bombay where there was an ra forest and there was a metro construction that was due there, which is almost near completion now. But the narrative ended up becoming. Because they had to cut down almost a forest area that was in the middle of the city, Mumbai, almost around 2,000 plus trees had to be cut down for the metro shed to be made way for. So the narrative eventually became forest versus Metro. Do you think NBS could have been a part of the solution where it was green versus gray kind of an approach? Yeah. Yeah. So there are still very many urban contexts where there is seen to be be this conflict between environment and development. And you know, in Growing cities in countries in South Asia. Of course, this is a big, big challenge. There can be ways I think, of working out how you can work with nature. I talked about the Chinese example before. I think one of the challenges is, is that those infrastructure projects always end up costing more money. But one of the ways of generating the finance for that is to think about risk mitigation. So where, when you're not in the kind of Chinese state context of doing this, where these things sometimes come together, it's where you can show that working with nature provides you with a buffer against heap or flooding or other forms of risk that allow that infrastructure to be. Yeah. Effectively to be insured at a lower rate and so then your return on capital is cheaper. So if you can reduce the cost of lending for the infrastructure investment, that's where you can see nature based solutions being built alongside. There's a few of those projects in small islands states where coastal protection is really significant, where leaving mangroves intact rather than building roads through the mangroves and things like this have been part of the equation. But I think it's harder to do in a really big city context. Yeah.
- [78:43]
B
Yes, right back here.
- [78:47]
A
Are we going till 8? Is that your plan? Yeah. Okay. Just so as I know basically myself.
- [78:54]
B
Hi, I'm Francesca. I'm a student in the Master's in Environment and Development. And my question is about the point you raised about how nature based solutions are oftentimes contested by indigenous communities who might feel that it is a western neocolonial approach to sustainable solutions. And I wondered if you could clarify more on if they have a problem with the terminology specifically or with the process of developing and co designing nature based solutions itself. And if that is the case, if there are any examples of successful nature based solution projects that you've seen that have worked with indigenous communities in an ethical and co productive way.
- [79:34]
A
Yeah, thank you very much for your question. I think it is both things. So the term solutions is objected to for all of the reasons partly that I raised at the beginning of the talk that somebody has decided what the problem is. If somebody has decided this is a solution. Right. And if you haven't been part of deciding what the problem is that needs to be solved, then that is an issue. So that the terminology is itself difficult and challenging. The practice is often just reinforces the idea that the terminology is difficult and challenging. But in terms of where we can see that it's working. Well, we did some work in. I'm going to forget in Edmonton in Canada. Edmonton is a city which has a reasonably large Indigenous Canadian population. And there what we found was the way in which different kinds of Inuit, other Indigenous communities, these ideas of nature were being built into the redevelopment and redesign of areas of the city. So that was about giving space. So it's literally giving property and giving land to others, which is a bit, you know, it's in the Canadian context, this idea of reparation by ceding land back to people whose land has been taken. That's a politics that exists and that can be done and is sometimes required under planning law. But where that land wasn't fully even given over, it was then co decided what it should be used for. So different kinds of ways, which forms of nature should be planted even in the park's gardens, like what should those gardens be representing? So it was really a generative policy that I mentioned Melbourne before and some of the challenges that they're having. But the intention is to work together with different communities to generate the kind of future nature there. So I think where you have an Indigenous communities in urban context which have gone through some kind of process where they're legally recognized, then those processes become more easier than in other situations where they're not so readily legally recognized as needing to have specific voice in processes. In terms of. There is one other way of thinking about this outside of the urban context. And this is, you know, maybe where some work I want to do in the future will go. One of the things we're seeing is, and you, none of you will be surprised to know that the nature and climate change is not a domain that is free from AI, Right? We're seeing a, a really significant boom in what we call nature tech, the emergence of new kinds of technologies to know nature from a distance. And one of the things which is really intriguing about that space is that often those that rise of nature tech is often being deployed in projects which are explicitly about partnering with Indigenous communities. And so this to me is very intriguing. If anybody needs to do a master's project and hasn't got an idea for a dissertation yet, go and explore the wonderful world of nature tech. There's lots going out, going on in there. But this specific way in which Indigenous communities and Indigenous community partnerships are being formed around like the tech industry and nature and nature markets, there's a lot to, there's a lot to find out about what's going on there. I would say, you know, I'm not going to say that all of it will be bad from the beginning because maybe some of it is being done in A respectful way. But let's find out, shall we?
- [83:21]
B
The last question is going to come from Ali online and in many ways it feels like a good question. To conclude on, can you share more about the on the ground and local implications of the concept of ambivalence? Having worked in urban planning in the us, I saw the rise of the interest in and nature based solutions across American cities. From my perspective, this often felt like an external signaling activity. Not to say it couldn't also have meaningful impacts as well. But I wonder what advice you'd offer to practitioners navigating these types of projects invested in ensuring they achieve justice.
- [83:55]
A
Yeah, thank you very much, Ali. I think what I mean by ambivalence is that we must always hold the possibility open that justice, justice can't be achieved, that we must never take it for granted that just because something looks like justice sounds like justice wants to be justice, it is going to be justice. And we must always open ourselves in that situation to working with the ambivalence that things are precarious achievements that they can take ongoing work to achieve. So I'm not suggesting that ambivalence is our end point. I'm suggesting that ambivalence is actually can be generative of making sure we get to the points that we want to get to in terms of advice for practitioners working with nature based solutions on the ground. Now we know, I mean, ever since environmental issues have come to be part of the mainstream, we've had language and discourse through which we've talked about them. Whether that's like sustainable development or ecosystem services or sustainable development goals or net zero. All of these things are ways which reframe policymakers, elites, organisations, businesses, etc. Frame the issues to make them legible to do certain kinds of work and then also not do other kinds of work. And my advice to practitioners would be, of course, to get much of the political traction and the financing you need, certain frames will need to be used. But to always know what those frames are allowing you to do and what they're preventing you from doing. And if you feel like a frame is preventing you from doing something that you feel is necessary in that place, to see whether you can just push the boundaries of the frame to make space for it within it, is probably the most pragmatic way of addressing that challenge at this present time.
- [85:43]
B
Well, that brings us to the end of tonight's event. This has been incredibly rich, so much to think about. We're so grateful to you for taking the time not just to give this talk but to spend the whole week with us. Please join me in thanking Professor Harry.
- [86:04]
A
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events Podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.