EUKN Urban Review: Innovating with nature: taking stock of 2021

Ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), nature-based solutions were put under the spotlight of a razor-sharp wave of criticism. A group of civil society and grassroots organisations from across the globe said “no to nature-based solutions dispossessions”. Their thundering statement argued that an uncritical approach to using nature to offset carbon emissions could very well lead to more unsustainable practices, benefiting multinational corporations over Indigenous communities, peasants, and other forest-dependent peoples. In the same vein, Friends of the Earth international exposes the danger of NBS being co-opted by big business driving fossil fuel extraction and industrial agriculture, becoming an instrument of green washing.

In our Urban Voices Blog, we talk to Martha Fajardo, Colombian landscape architect and partner in CONEXUS, about the different perspective on NBS offered by ancestral cosmovisions. Another partner in CONEXUS and Post-doc researcher at SLU, Geovana Mercado, tells us what Nature-based Thinking is all about. Read on to learn more about the EUKN’s work on this topic and our top reads and watches!