The Partnership on Sustainable Use of Land and Nature-based Solutions (SUL-NBS) continues its journey: At meetings in December 2017 and January/February 2018, the partners focused on the exploration of a first set of draft actions.

The December meeting in Zagreb had focused on identifying and discussing key thematic areas to be enclosed in the two overarching topics: liveable compactness and nature-based solutions. An important part of the discussion centred on assessing the areas of EU competence and the need of agreeing on common definitions of key concepts and terms. In addition, the participants identified potential challenges and outlined types of actions that might be explored for the two overarching topics and five thematic areas:

• Financial models
• Greening the cities
• Reducing land take
• Awareness and capacity
• Functional urban areas

This brainstorming was carried on to the subsequent fourth Partnership meeting in Bologna in January/February 2018, where the Partnership kicked off the exploratory work on an initial set of draft actions. After a review of the working papers on the five cross-cutting themes, the partners started identifying the key action areas. The meeting closed with an invitation to all partners to work further on shaping the exploratory actions in view of the fifth meeting to take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 23 to 25 April 2018.