Breakfast at UUniCORN: Advantages and risks of nature-based solutions to goal conflicts

Nature-based solutions are increasingly promoted as win-win answers to pressing environmental and societal challenges. But an important question is whether these solutions can really balance competing goals, such as protecting biodiversity while also supporting farming, forestry, or energy production.

Jayne Glass, Researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, will guide us into the work of a network of researchers from across Uppsala University who have been supported by UUniCORN to explore this issue.

We will get a peek at research on the advantages and the risks of nature-based solutions, as an idea and in practice.

"Although nature-based solutions can create opportunities to protect biodiversity, the concept is often vague and can be used by powerful actors in ways that maintain unsustainable systems, rather than creating real change," says Jayne Glass.

Drawing on insights from two interdisciplinary workshops, the presentation will consider critical issues of governance, justice, and knowledge. Who decides what counts as a “solution”? How can we make sure nature-based solutions are fair and include different types of knowledge, including Indigenous perspectives?

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Come share a coffee and your thoughts with us. Please register by Wednesday, 18 March, if you would like coffee/tea and a sandwich; otherwise, no pre-registration is required.

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About the project:

Jayne Glass and Malgorzata Blicharska are leading an initiative focusing on how to navigate the goal conflict between natural resource exploitation and conservation. Suggesting nature-based solutions as a means to overcome this urgent and complex divide. The project has received a catalyst grant from UUniCORN, the Institute for Research on Goal Conflicts in Sustainable Societal Transformation, to develop the ideas.

UUniCORN is part of UUniFI, Uppsala University Future Institutes.