JUSTNature Final Event in Brussels and Leuven
iUE, project partner of JUSTNature, was in Belgium during the second week of February 2026 for the project’s Final Event. The two-day gathering was an opportunity to celebrate the project’s achievements, deploying co-created Nature-based Solutions (NbS) across seven European cities and advancing fairer, greener urban environments for the course of four and a half years.
During the project’s lifetime, iUE’s work focused on organising cross-learning activities, fostering city-to-city exchange both among partner and external regions. Additionally, we conducted research on state-of-the-art co-governance schemes, applied to the deployment of NbS. Our work also included communication and dissemination tasks, ensuring the outcomes and learnings of the project reached a wide audience, from practitioners to researchers, the general public and policy makers.
Photo: Elza Lőw
Photo: Elza Lőw
Photos: Elza Lőw
Final Event
On February 10th, the JUSTNature Final Conference took place in Brussels. It counted with the presence of one of iUE’s directors, Daniele Vettorato, project manager Tannya Pico and project officer Mariana Binder. The event, titled Towards JUST, Sustainable Urban Transformations brought together international experts, project partners and city practitioners to discuss what it means to deliver equitable NbS that promote ecological justice and involve communities from the very start.
With panel discussions, keynote presentations and roundtables, the conference offered a thorough review of the project’s achievements, as well as opportunities to exchange and learn from other European projects and colleagues working on participatory planning and Nature-based Solutions worldwide. Sessions addressed topics such as citizen engagement, environmental justice, upscaling of NbS, policy integration, and urban greening. As part of the conference, iUE designed posters for the City Practice Labs (CiPeLs) exhibition, during which project partners presented the green interventions carried out as part of the JUSTNature project in their cities.
On February 11th, attendees took part in four walking in cycling tours in the city of Leuven, one of the project’s CiPeLs, where experts guided them through the city’s intervention sites. In the afternoon, the Consortium held the last Project Meeting, during which discussions focused on building on the project’s experience and brainstorming ideas for future collaboration.