By Luiza Toledo, IIASA Science Communication Fellow 2019
2019 YSSP participant Regina Buono investigates how the law can support or impede the use of nature-based solutions and help facilitate adaptation to climate change.
Recognizing the need for a systemic change is the first step to overcoming environmental challenges like climate change. In theory, governance systems can be designed and arranged to facilitate and embrace adaptation to climate change. Developing a legal framework that supports such an adaptation is, however, a big challenge. Learning how to manage the environmental crisis we currently find ourselves in while still being able to grow economically further complicates matters. According to Regina Buono, a participant in this year’s IIASA Young Scientist Summer Program (YSSP), nature-based solutions could be an alternative option that offers a multitude of benefits in terms of how this dual goal of economic growth and sustainability can be achieved. Buono’s research will contribute to IIASA as a partner in the EU Horizon 2020 project, PHUSICOS, which is demonstrating how nature-based solutions can reduce the risk of extreme weather events in rural mountain landscapes.
Outdoor green living wall, vertical garden on modern office building | © Josefkubes | Dreamstime.com
Nature-based solutions are actions to protect, manage, or restore natural ecosystems that address societal challenges, such as water security, pollution, or natural disasters – sometimes simultaneously. These solutions take advantage of the system processes found in nature – such as the water regulation function of wetlands, the allowance of natural space in floodplains to buffer flooding impacts, water storage in recharged aquifers, or carbon storage in prairies – to tackle environmental problems. This concept is now widely used to reframe policy debates on biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, urban resilience, as well as the sustainable use of natural resources.
As part of her research, Buono is exploring how the law can support or impede the use of nature-based solutions and considering how we can make legal systems more adaptive so they can help facilitate societal adaptation to a more uncertain world under ongoing and future climate change.
“My research is about using the law as a tool that works for us, rather than one that, because of its historic interest in stability, gets in the way,” she says.
Regina Buono, YSSP participant. | © Buono
Buono started her career as a lawyer based in the US. In her first job she was assigned to work with water issues and according to her, it was “love at first sight”. Following that first assignment, she continued to work on finding market-based solutions for issues related to endangered species. She decided to pursue a PhD in public policy in 2016, and soon after was asked to join the external advisory board to the Nature Insurance Value: Assessment and Demonstration (NAIAD) project in Europe. While attending the first meeting, she realized that there were no lawyers or legal scholars among the project researchers. As a lawyer, she could see that there was a gap in understanding how law and regulations would impact the uptake, development, and proliferation of nature-based solutions.
Working with NAIAD, she developed her PhD dissertation to address this gap and advance understanding around the role of the law in nature-based solutions, both in terms of governance in implementation and practice and the potential for governance innovation that better supports and promotes future adaptation.
“My YSSP project here at IIASA focuses on the city of Valladolid, Spain, and examines the legal context around the implementation of a collection of nature-based solution projects. I am trying to draw insights from these that could perhaps also be applied to other cases,” she explains.
Buono is doing a critical qualitative study that integrates analyses of interviews and policy documents using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis computer software package specifically designed to work with very rich text-based and/or multimedia information, together with legal analysis. She says that there is still a lot of work to be done to adapt to climate change and an interdisciplinary cross-sector effort will be necessary.
The preliminary results from her YSSP research point to a number of constraints and facilitating factors related to law and regulation. She says that the lack of explicit legal authorization for nature-based solutions that she identified in her study, strict water quality regulations, and bureaucratic hurdles could be some of the factors that constrain the implementation of nature-based solutions. However, flexibility in the law and a polycentric governance structure was identified as facilitating factors that encourage local entities to opt for nature-based solutions.
Buono hopes that her research will help decision makers to assess and address legal components that guide, structure, or impede the use of nature-based solutions, and to consider how the law could be evolved to create a more enabling environment for more adaptive governance arrangements that would better support nature-based solutions.
“Our policies and infrastructure are going to have to change to be able to deal with the impacts that we are already experiencing. Nature-based solutions and a shift toward adaptive governance could help us navigate more gracefully in these important transitions,” she concludes.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
You must be logged in to post a comment.