Environmental justice as inspiration for forest and nature conservationists

Discovering Environmental Justice: An Introduction
Given the urgency of climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, some people may narrow their focus down to the technological and ecological aspects of conservation. However, while doing my PhD research at FNP over the last four years, I started to realise that to create holistic and sustainable solutions, I also needed to consider the social and ethical dimensions of our work. When investigating the Collective Forest Tenure Reform (CFTR) to allocate forestland to rural households, protect forestland property rights, and encourage private forestry investment, a local interviewee who received forestland and invested in forestry expressed ’extreme injustice!‘ when talking about policy changes in the 2010’s which had restricted him from harvesting timber and getting investment payback. These policy changes included a series of increased governmental restrictions on timber harvest, which emerged after the Chinese government proposed the policy discourse ’Ecological Civilization’ to increase environmental conservations.

Throughout my research journey, I found ‘environmental justice’ – a rising concept in recent governance research – to be a necessary and guiding beacon, providing philosophical grounding and inspiration for our collective endeavors in forest and nature conservation.

Forests are more than just collections of trees; they are socio-ecological systems that involve both nature and human communities. Traditional conservation approaches sometimes involve the ignorance of the needs and rights of the local communities or even the eviction of local people from their ancestral lands to create ’protected areas’. Such approaches, however, can perpetuate a cycle of poverty and environmental degradation. Ecosystems are often most vulnerable where social inequalities are highest. For example, logging or mining operations frequently target impoverished regions, affecting both the local communities and the biodiversity of the region. Therefore, the crucial intersections of environmental justice within the domains of forest and nature conservation cannot be overlooked if we aspire for a just and equitable approach in conservation, acknowledging and incorporating local communities as equal participants and beneficiaries in the process.

Unpacking and applying Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is a multidisciplinary and multi-faceted concept, seeking to address the unfairness of environmental benefits and burdens among people, irrespective of their race, nationality, income, or social status. Despite various understandings towards environmental justice, the idea is deeply rooted in principles of equity, recognizing that marginalized communities often bear the brunt of environmental degradation and exploitation. There are three dimensions cohesively related to “environmental justice”:

• Distribution Justice: It concerns the fair distribution of benefits and costs regarding environmental matters among actors.
• Participation Justice: It investigates whether all actors in a policy domain have equal access to the decision-making process to determine policy outcomes and mobilize resources.
• Recognition justice: It requires mutual recognition among actors, which unfolds through the appreciation of the statuses of diverse individuals and groups that are constituted by their rights, knowledge, and values.
  
  These theoretical considerations helped me to understand how and why the aforementioned local interviewee perceived injustice regarding these restrictive policy changes. First, the absence of fair financial compensation for timber harvest restrictions violated the distribution justice. Second, newly-imposed restrictions on timber harvest were through a top-down governmental process, violating the participation justice. While local people received forestland property rights, they were excluded from the decision-making process, being unaware of the restrictions until their timber harvests (people need to apply for timber harvest quotas at local forestry department before harvest). Third, despite being fully aware of the restrictions and financial losses of local people, local forestry officials did not recognize local people’s statuses constituted through the forestland property rights.
  
  During this process, I have learned that environmental justice is not a side issue but a core philosophy that can help guide effective and equitable conservation efforts. It is more than moral principles; it is also about sustainable solutions for all actors. By understanding and applying its principles, we can aim for conservation outcomes that benefit both nature and human society. After all, conservation is not only about preserving landscapes and species, but also about fostering a society that lives in harmony with its environment.