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Equity and fairness – ‘gold standard’ or essential to climate and nature solutions?

Image courtesy of iStock (Andy Lewington)
Blog 2026

Our latest blog post is from Freya Laing, Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Officer in our Social Science and Evaluation Team. Freya explores the role of justice in the context of climate and nature decision making.

Decisions around climate adaptation and nature recovery directly shape livelihoods, access to resources and community well-being. Yet, social and environmental issues are often siloed, with immediate pressures from health and social care taking priority over preparing for environmental threats. 

Taking a justice approach can help highlight how protecting nature supports wider social objectives – and why it matters now.

From ethics to action

Efforts to address the twin climate and nature crisis will, in some ways, benefit all. However, evidence shows that without careful consideration, opportunities to deliver fair and effective solutions are missed.

Tools, such as the UK Social Flood Risk Index and the Cayman Islands Resilience Index, illustrate how social vulnerability and exposure to environmental hazards intersect, helping decision makers to target action which mitigates disproportional impacts. In St Helena, a UK Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, JNCC supported the development of evidence for adaptation planning using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) risk framework. This helped identify who is most vulnerable to climate change, while aligning climate actions with national health priorities.  

Justice, used well, provides practical ways to mobilise action and improve the effectiveness of interventions. This strengthens outcomes because:  

  1. Inequality creates structural barriers to action: Many of the barriers to effective climate and nature solutions are socio-economic – linked to governance, decision-making and resources – which are within our power to shape. 
  2. Targeting support where it is most needed increases resilience: Directing resources to the people and places most at risk strengthens capacity for change, closing the gap between vulnerability and resilience.
  3. Ignoring justice undermines outcomes for nature: Without considering how impacts differ across groups, interventions can reinforce existing inequalities, reducing public support, limiting uptake and missing wider socio-economic gains. 

So, what is justice in climate and nature transitions?

Justice, as outlined in Article 3 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is both spatial and temporal – addressing the global impacts of past and present emissions, as well as the burdens passed onto future generations. Environmental justice, which gained prominence through civil rights and racial justice movements, has long highlighted how environmental harms are closely linked to social inequality. Today, environmental justice is commonly understood through three dimensions:

  • Distributive justice: who benefits from and who bears the cost of decisions.
  • Procedural justice: who has a voice in decision-making.
  • Recognition: whose knowledge, needs and values are considered. 

These dimensions are reflected in international frameworks, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. At the same time rights – and increasingly the rights of nature – are becoming central to environmental justice.

While justice is being mainstreamed at the global level, research shows that biodiversity initiatives and policy rarely include it as an explicit objective.  

In day-to-day project delivery, these concepts can seem less tangible and relevant. But can taking steps to integrate justice really improve outcomes for nature?

Justice in practice

The impacts of climate change and nature loss are increasing and will make adaptation harder over time. A key strength of embedding justice is that it helps align priorities across government to address multiple pressures. For example, the Cayman Islands Climate Change Policy (2024–2050) centres ‘healthy and resilient communities’ as a core pillar of resilience, focused on addressing disparities to climate-related health solutions.

There are three main steps we can take to embed justice throughout project lifecycles:

  1. Make justice a core objective from the start: Define what justice means in the project context and build it into design, delivery and evaluation, linking biodiversity action to clear social outcomes as appropriate. 
  2. Widen your knowledge base: Incorporate diverse knowledge systems, including community perspectives to better navigate distributional impacts.
  3. Build accountability into delivery: Track measurable social impacts alongside environmental impacts and establish processes to manage trade-offs and respond to unintended impacts. 

Final thoughts

Political and economic inequalities are not just outcomes of climate change and biodiversity loss but key drivers of it, placing justice at the centre environmental action. As noted in the UK Government's report on climate and nature, “integrated approaches that align environmental, economic, and social goals are essential for delivering resilient, long-term outcomes” but “must be navigated with care, foresight, and transparency”.

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