Stewardship of Community-led NbS

In the past decade, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have emerged as a powerful tool to aid in addressing the climate crisis while simultaneously tackling social and economic challenges. While NbS is used as an umbrella term to describe a multitude of solutions, from forest restoration to water management, how and by who these solutions are implemented by can drastically impact the effectiveness of intended outcomes.

This project focuses on urban NbS largely planned and implemented by and for community members the NbS aims to benefit. With urban areas supporting most of the earth’s populations, initiatives such as community gardens, rain gardens, and mini forests have become vital for improving environmental quality but also are important for the realization of just and democratic communities.

The project uses surveys to look at participant motivations, which can be useful for discerning how to push these initiatives towards longer-term stewardship. It expands to qualitative interviews to try and map the local governance to understand how different factors of community greening initiatives may influence each other. The final objective of the project looks at how equitable the planning and actions may be in order to achieve different facets of justice. While justice may have diverse meanings among different societies, the local level this project remains at allows for the research to work towards the visions of justice understood by local organizations, participants, and beneficiaries.

The project works together with local organizations located in cities around Canada, which are financially and technically supported by a third-party NGO, Green Communities Canada (GCC). To not only have the outcomes of the project support justice efforts, the team regularly meets with GCC to discuss and modify the project to maintain relevance for GCC’s support in local organizations.