Evaluating spatial justice in European nature futures

Abstract Environmental policies are increasingly expected to deliver both ecological gains and socially just outcomes. Yet large-scale scenario studies rarely evaluate how future land-use changes may distribute environmental benefits, burdens, and restoration responsibilities across communities and scales. Here, we present a dashboard of distributional justice metrics to assess the outcomes of five European land-use scenarios, namely the three Nature Futures Framework scenarios (Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture), a hybrid Plural scenario, and an SSP2 business-as-usual counterfactual. Using a multi-metric analysis, we quantify the distribution of benefits (access to nature and its services) and burdens (exposure to agricultural pollution) between vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations (equity), across the whole population (equality), as well as the relative restoration contributions per country (responsibility). The results show that no single scenario optimizes all justice dimensions simultaneously, instead revealing trade-offs between total benefit provision, distributive equity for vulnerable populations, and population-wide equality. Nature for Nature produces high overall benefit gains but weaker distributive targeting, Nature for Society combines high benefit equity and equality with pronounced burden inequity, while Nature as Culture and the Plural scenario perform more evenly across multiple dimensions. The SSP2 counterfactual shows comparatively poorer outcomes, including lower benefit access and higher burden concentration in vulnerable areas. Responsibility for restoration is also unevenly distributed across countries. These findings demonstrate that evaluating distributional justice outcomes requires multiple metrics. While synergies between environmental and justice outcomes are evident, different approaches for implementing nature positive futures lead to complex trade-offs between different dimensions.