Project

RESEARCH

COMCHA Community-based change: local and traditional knowledges in NBS

  • Team: Environmental Health in Islands (EHI)
  • Type: BIODIVERSA +
  • Category:International Research Project
  • 2025 to 2028
WEBPAGE

Summary

The goal of this project is to study how community knowledge and practices, constituting a form of non-conventional NBS, can contribute to leveraging regenerative processes aligned with the goals of the European Green Deal and the European Partnership for Biodiversity. Fostering mutual learning between European contexts and Overseas Countries on issues such as community engagement, co-governance, just redistribution of natural resources and community-based solutions for adaptation to environmental challenges, this project aims to identify blind spots in universalised approaches to NBS, collecting a set of features able to enhance and leverage processes of co-creation and collective implementation. Analysing community-driven nature-based solutions in threatened lands for socio-environmental issues, the following assumptions underlie this proposal:

  1.  traditional and local knowledges may play a pivotal role in community processes of change associated with regenerative food systems, inclusive urban regeneration and adaptation to environmental challenges;
  2. transformative change theory may benefit from theoretical and methodological refreshment coming from a process of intercultural translation, with mutual learnings between European and Overseas countries, particularly with regard to the pressure of anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity loss;
  3. indigenous and other traditional practices not only bring new perspectives to the concept of transformative change but also foster a new look at a set of popular-based technologies of production aligned with biodiversity. 

Funding Institution

FCT-Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology

Partners