The Natural Heritage Mission organised an enjoyable and fruitful meeting with the Thematic Projects on the 26th and 27th of June 2024 in Rovinj, Croatia. The host of the event was the Marine Institute in Croatia (Dialogue4Nature project partner).
It was the occasion for the lead partners and communication managers from all 13 Thematic Projects (TPs), as well as for the partners of the Natural Heritage Mission’s Governance projects (Community4Nature and Dialogue4Nature), to meet in person.
The community dove into the local culture and visited the Eco-Museum Batana, a cultural centre and museum dedicated to preserving local maritime and fishing culture. In that same place, the Mission celebrated the ‘European Maritime Day in my Country’ with a poster exhibition on marine conservation, in collaboration with Marevivo (Mission’s Associated Partner) and with the contribution of TREASURE and MedSeaRise Thematic Projects.
On the second day, the Natural Heritage community had productive discussions and interactive sessions on topics such as results amplification and synergic transfers, policy and legislative frameworks, and communication empowerment.
The members of the community co-created a joint calendar for the next period, sharing milestones and events foreseen by their projects in order to have an overview of what is happening in the community and create synergies.
In a policy interactive session, each thematic project explained the approach to be followed to target global and EU policy frameworks through their results, and how the Mission can contribute to those efforts. This session allowed each project to review their targeted policies, building on those identified on the application phase, and to cover newcomers, such as the EU Nature Restoration Law and others not yet highlighted as the Common Agricultural Policy and the EU Forest Strategy. They further identified the policy relevant outputs that would address those policies and the support expected from the Mission to reach out specific stakeholders and how that could be materialised. The exercise also mapped key external events for the TPs and the Mission.
Finally, a capacity building activity took place aiming to ‘upskill’ the Thematic Project partners in terms of effective communication and efficient collaboration with the Governance Projects and to increase the visibility of their activities. The day concluded with a summary session, highlighting key issues and outlining next steps.
The meeting was productive in terms of cooperation, policy alignment, and communication strategy/planning. The most interesting take-aways, according to the Thematic Projects representatives, were the networking aiming to build a strong community and amplify all activities and results, and the potential synergies between activities and projects (e.g. tools, methodologies, events, etc.) for a future collaboration.
