Speaker
Description
NbS are hailed for their multiple benefits and their effectiveness to alleviate and respond to the risks presented by climate change. Yet, scholarship increasingly challenges NBSs underlying principles and values, highlighting that those who most need the benefits of NbS, often are not in receipt of them. Consequently, NBS practice has been critiqued for failing to engage with existing inequities and in some cases, reproduces inequalities through NbS practice. In this presentation, I outline a novel intersectional framework which builds on climate justice and urban care frameworks to empirically examine four key dimensions; spatial and material factors, social and network relationships, place based climate adaptation and cross identity climate action with cross cutting themes of intersectionality and more-than-human in Amsterdam, Brussels and Bucharest. We employ abductive methods to enable person derived variables of vulnerability, that are then ranked using Q-sort methodology and lastly, we carry out a weighted GIS-based socio-spatial hotspot index at a city scale. Through this approach we intend to derive new co-created assemblages of data that recharacterize the impacts of NbS on multiply marginalized people and more-than humans and reflect their lived experiences of vulnerabilities in relation to NbS and climate adaption. Moreover, we intentionally engage with the theoretical paradoxes of intersectionality that seek to avoid reinforcement of inequalities through homogenized conceptions of vulnerability, but instead point to the relational power structures and lack of urban care regimes that create uneven impacts to communities and multispecies environments that are subjected to increased vulnerabilities.
| Keywords | Nature-based solutions; Intersectionality; Justice |
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