From Research to Transformative Practice Labs: Investing in GREEN TALENTs to Build Capacities for Systemic Change

As societies address the twin challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change, nature-based solutions (NbS) are often proposed as systemic interventions that bridge the socio-economic-cultural, environmental and technological domains. Yet wider NbS uptake and implementation continue to face key challenges arising from knowledge and practice gaps, fragmented mandates, rigid governance and institutional and cultural lock-ins, and competing framings of NbS value. The Horizon Europe "GREEN TALENT - Building Capacity and Partnerships for Systemic Solutions to the Climate and Biodiversity Crises" project (2025–2029) seeks to overcome traditional barriers limiting NbS implementation to address biodiversity loss and climate change, and embed NbS within a broader green and digital transition. Through four national demonstration hubs, in Malta, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, the project facilitates 45 secondments and cross-sector mentoring and collaboration with EU and US-based partners, and hands-on co-creation of NbS-oriented interventions.  Concurrently, GREEN TALENT involves demonstration hubs and regional stakeholders to co-design and deliver open-access interdisciplinary training modules focusing on nature-based and systemic solutions, but also research and innovation capacity building, grant management, entrepreneurship and stakeholder engagement, thereby empowering and supporting a new generation of “green talents”.

Through this presentation we illustrate how GREEN TALENT reframes NbS as entry points for a transformative practice lab model established through place-based experimentation, monitoring, evidence generation and iterative testing, and multi-stakeholder platforms.  This approach deliberately focuses on aligning ecological to social, institutional and economic transformations by cultivating interdisciplinary and shared vocabularies and collaborative digital infrastructures that extend beyond the lifespan of typical NbS pilots.

Using examples from initial hub set-up, cross-sector networks and capacity-building designs, we highlight how GREEN TALENT support is addressing existing knowledge and practice gaps through capacity-building, clustering, knowledge exchange, and inclusive, long-term NbS upscaling. We argue that such a talent-centred, learning-based, hub-driven framework is instrumental for transitioning from fragmented and isolated NbS implementation toward a more systemic and equitable nature-positive transformations across diverse landscapes and seascapes.