Concepts and methods for integrating environmental justice and Nature-based solutions in cities

Over the past decades, the environmental justice movement has developed growing concerns about the unequal distribution of environmental harms and the uneven access to environmental amenities. The movement rapidly became an academic field that has criticised diverse urban sustainability strategies for failing to address environmental justice issues in its three dimensions: recognition, procedure and distribution. Hence, this thesis aims to explore how this concept could be integrated into the planning of Nature-based solutions in cities through advancing conceptual and methodological contributions. Through an extensive revision of academic literature, several setbacks in the inclusion of environmental justice for urban Nature-based solutions are addressed. This information helped operationalise a distributive environmental justice index that could identify intra-urban injustices related to existing and compounding issues such as the overburdening of environmental risk for socially disadvantaged communities and a lack of access to multifunctional green space benefits. Once these injustices are identified, alternative scenarios for implementing Nature-based solutions are assessed by considering relevant urban planning and policy goals. The last part of this thesis focuses on the level of integration of environmental justice in the context of climate change adaptation and mitigation. An extensive review of Urban Climate Action Plans in Latin America reveals that environmental justice concerns are rarely translated into concrete climate actions. Moreover, the transformative potential of Nature-based solutions for ameliorating environmental justice conditions in cities is not fully explored. With these results, potential opportunities and recommendations that could enable environmental justice are discussed, especially highlighting that the integration of diverse social perspectives and realities is integral to the process of giving rise to just and sustainable urban futures.