Implementing more relational approaches to NbS assessment and integration

Implementing more relational approaches to NbS assessment and integration to help design and implement NbS in ways that align with and promote diverse human-nature relationships, and address critiques that NbS are only grounded in market-based logics of performance, cost-effectiveness, and pursuit of unsustainable economic growth, which are associated with the destruction of biodiversity globally. Similarly, previous studies suggest that NbS are often embedded asymmetrically in urban environments, more often guided by social exclusion, neoliberal governance and growth ideologies. To move beyond these logics and foster biodiversity conservation, R&I can document new relational approaches to NbS assessment that take account of different ways that people live from, live with, live in and/or live as nature, enabling identification of how NbS can be designed and implemented in ways that align with and promote these diverse human-nature relationships. This includes improved consideration of relational values and worldviews, and indigenous and local knowledge perspectives on human-nature relationships which often assume no separation between humans and the benefits one receives from nature.

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