Olivia Won, CSP class of 2023, focused her capstone project on exploring avenues for advancing equity and justice considerations for multi-benefit nature-based climate adaptation efforts in coastal regions. She has just published, Operationalizing equity in nature-based coastal adaptation: Assessing practitioner perspectives from the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in the June 2025 issue of the journal Nature-Based Solutions. The paper is co-authored by CSP core faculty member Katherine Seto, who advised Olivia for her project.
Highlights
• Improving social equity is an increasingly common co-occurring goal in nature-based climate change adaptation policy and project work.
• We assessed how practitioners are operationalizing and responding to calls for equity in nature-based coastal adaptation (NBCA) projects in California.
• We found that practitioners are mostly focused on addressing procedural and distributive inequities instead of more complex framings that require meaningful structural change.
• NBCA practitioners should expand their focus to address multiple dimensions of equity.