The conference, organized as part of an initiative led by the President of the Estonian Republic from the EU Council, was led by the Ministry of the Environment of Estonia together with the University of Tallinn.
The conference covered different aspects related to the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) to face different societal challenges such as climate change, water security, food security, and human health. Most of these issues will be addressed by the URBAN GreenUP methodology developed and tested in three front-runner cities (Valladolid, Izmir and Liverpool) in the course of the next five years.
Several joint project initiatives were introduced in the plenary session, followed by different parallel meetings facilitated by ThinkNature, a project that supports all EU projects focused on Nature Based Solutions (NBS), here including URBAN GreenUP. URBAN GreenUP actively participated in the holistic discussion involving scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs from around the world on applying governance, policy, research and innovation.
The conference represented an occasion to organize the second policy meeting of the four taskforces endorsed by the European Commission and involving all the EU-funded NBS projects to address the following issues
(i) “Data Management and EU NBS Knowledge Repository” (URBAN GreenUP representative, GMV);
(ii) “NBS Impact Evaluation Framework” (URBAN GreenUP representative, CARTIF and The Mersey Forest); (
(iii) “Governance, Business Models and Financial Mechanisms” (URBAN GreenUP representative, Bocconi University)
(iv) “Communication and Dissemination” (URBAN GreenUP representative, iCube).