Harriet Bulkeley’s research while affiliated with Durham University and other places

As governments, businesses, investors and civil society increasingly turn to ‘Nature-Based Solutions’ (NBS) as central means to govern the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, a particular form of expertise is jostling for attention in this crowded policy arena – Nature Tech. Nature Tech is a broad term used to encompass ‘smart tech’ trained on nature, involving tools such as eDNA, machine learning algorithms, and other forms of tech-enabled measurement, observation and prediction. While Nature Tech is not mandated by a central governing authority to steer these NBS agendas, there is an emerging consensus that such tools are needed to steer the governing of NBS. Understanding how such an emerging consensus is generated and sustained raises questions where authority to accomplish tech-enabled governance is attained. Centring these questions leads us to the ongoing work by the Nature Tech community, and more specifically to Nature4Climate, a focal actor through which we enter the community. While the Nature Tech community are making claims to save NBS from the inevitable barriers evaluating their multiple impacts in highly varied conditions, these claims and their politics are rarely subject to interrogation. To go deeper into understanding how Nature Tech becomes a form of politics that is both pervasive and authoritative, this paper attends to four dynamics of problematization which are essential to assemble the authority to govern for nature: (re)assembling, forging alignments, rendering technical and authorising knowledge while managing contestations. Based on a “mobile” ethnography, this paper reveals how a growing number of actors enrolled in the Nature Tech community are authorising Nature Tech as an obligatory passageway shaping the possibilities for action. This has undetermined and potentially radical implications for how governance along shifting and unfolding climate-biodiversity frontiers is accomplished.

This introductory textbook with a global scope aims to train students of geography, sustainability, and urban and environmental studies to re-imagine and transform cities to meet climate, biodiversity, and sustainability challenges. A dedicated team of authors critically examine the relationships between nature and urban areas, sharing an inspiring account of how nature helps us re-think our cities and their futures. Prior to this textbook, literature for courses covering urban nature was written by and for practitioners, whereas this textbook is written by experienced course instructors specifically to be accessible to diverse students. The textbook is illustrated with numerous photos and figures which bring key topics, challenges, and opportunities to life. It contains focus boxes and case studies from every continent, offering students an international scope and multiple entry points into the field. Chapters conclude with thought-provoking follow-up questions and recommended reading. The authors provide an array of supplementary online resources.

Ever since climate change came to occupy a place on the research and policy landscape in the 1980s, geography and geographers have been at the forefront of understanding its dynamics and social, economic, ethical, and political consequences. In this collection, we explore how the geographical understanding of climate change has evolved over time. We reflect on what we consider to be the most significant contributions that geography has made to our understanding of climate change, how the discipline's approach to this issue has changed over time, the gaps and limits in our understanding, and what the future of climate‐changed geographies might be.

Globally, various frames of urban nature circulate, each emphasising particular challenges and natural solutions in the climate context. Yet which actors and dynamics shape their translation to the African context remains unclear. This paper explores the global-to-local translation process of frames through interventions funded by transnational actors, conceptualised as agents of policy transfer. Critical scholarship has observed that urban adaptation and resilience interventions in Africa are often characterised as technocratic and top-down approaches, hence it is vital to understand whether these are replicated through proliferating nature-based solutions (NBSs). The study of a resilience-building intervention in Lilongwe, Malawi, reveals that transnational actors play important roles by deploying frames of urban nature through funding projects. However, rather than involving a top-down imposition of particular solutions, this sets in motion dynamics: in the competition for resources that frames generate, various actor constellations of transnational actors, subnational governments and local NGOs reconfigure or relabel strategies and associated (nature-based) practices to suit global frames and the resources they generate. This shapes who is included or not, and what kinds of NBS are being developed, for and by whom. There is a risk that priorities of communities get lost in translation. Policy relevance Frames of urban nature shape global agendas but also matter locally in the design of programmes and projects. This study provides key insights of relevance for policymakers. First, external funding for climate and resilience is unpredictable and insufficient to address manifold urgent local priorities. It is important that actors at all levels strive to align resources to holistic strategies of local governments and do not impose certain visions for urban nature. For this to happen, and second, it is key that local governments and communities are empowered to create forms of nature that are built around diverse forms of local knowledge and expertise, to cater to values and priorities of the communities. Third, proponents of NBSs highlight their potential to address interlinked climate-, biodiversity- and society-related challenges. However, unless funding allocation puts emphasis on the interlinkage of goals, the potential for NBSs to reach multiple goals can get lost. Fourth, there is a need to disrupt the persisting scepticism concerning the feasibility of NBSs in informal settlements and forge collaborations that realise interventions closely linked to the priorities of disadvantaged groups in African cities, to leverage the power of nature for more just societies.

We analyze the potential of the European Union (EU) Taxonomy (ET) for Sustainable Activities to mobilize investments for the sustainability transition toward urban nature-based solutions (UNBS). We map the current investment landscape of UNBS in Europe and combine this mapping with document analysis of UNBS inclusion in the ET to understand how the ET might help overcome the well-documented barriers to UNBS finance. We suggest that the ET has a legitimizing effect on UNBS as climate investments, which can support their uptake, but also conclude that only some UNBS subtypes are explicitly included when they fit with existing investment classes. In particular, the ET (1) disregards innovative-and specifically urban-UNBS types and (2) fails to provide incentives for investments that can deliver multiple sustainable objectives, which would enhance the investment case for UNBS. Since the current investment landscape of UNBS is characterized by a strong presence of public actors and a high incidence of co-financing, we recommend that public actors leverage the ET to obtain private funding for UNBS via (green) bond issuance and public-private co-finance instruments. Our analysis indicates that the ability of the ET to upscale investments for specific sustainability transitions depends on the interplay among their current investment landscapes, specific financing barriers, and explicit inclusion in the ET.

Growing recognition of the need to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss together is leading to shifts in the global environmental governance landscape such that these two traditionally separate domains are increasingly interlinked. This process is taking place not at the level of the international policy regimes but rather through the work of transnational governance initiatives (TGIs) that connect state and non-state actors and which form an increasingly formalized part of the hybrid regime complexes through which global environmental governance is conducted. Central to these dynamics are ‘nature-based solutions’, interventions designed to work with nature to achieve multiple sustainability goals. In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which TGIs frame and implement nature-based solutions. We show how this is leading to an evolution in market and asset-based responses to addressing these twin challenges and consider the wider consequences for how we understand what effective responses to the interlinked problems of climate and biodiversity entail.

Transnational governance initiatives (TGIs) are increasingly recognized as central actors in the governing of climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, their role in linking these domains has yet to be explored. As the climate crisis comes to be increasingly interlinked with the loss of biodiversity, such initiatives are increasingly combining this challenge of climate change with action on biodiversity loss through the deployment of nature-based solutions, with significant consequences for the ways in which the nature problem and its solutions are framed and implemented. Employing a governmentality approach, this research reveals two overarching rationales by TGIs of biodiversity as a means to climate change and biodiversity loss as “asset-at-risk” that are rendered governable through myriad techniques “at a distance” and “in proximity.” By revealing how biodiversity is made to fit with the climate arena, this research finds that these governable biodiversity spaces could generate rather regrettable solutions along these shifting and unfolding climate–biodiversity frontiers.