Beyond flood risk reduction: How can green infrastructure advance both social justice and regional impact?

Green infrastructure is being pulled in divergent directions. As climate impacts intensify, advocates are promoting larger, ecosystem-scale strategies to help mitigate flood risks. Yet, research on existing urban greening projects finds that they can cause gentrification and displacement, suggesting that smaller projects may be more desirable from an equity perspective. This essay argues that cities need both large-scale and justice-enhancing nature-based solutions. They can help overcome tensions in these goals by (1) reframing green infrastructure as a way to support community development and integrated socio-ecological landscapes, and (2) advancing metropolitan regional governance strategies that alleviate municipal fiscal imperatives to maximize local land development. These proposals suggest that the practice of green infrastructure would benefit from diversifying its ranks to include social and government policy, community development, and agroecology, as well as learning from the Global South and those currently positioned as “off the map” of technical expertise. They also point to the need for interdisciplinary research that provides an evidence base for more transformative social, ecological, and governance strategies. While the essay focuses on the US context, it is relevant to an international audience given that similar challenges confront cities worldwide and that it highlights how the Global North can learn from the Global South.