In the first week of July MedCities participated actively at the meeting held in Marseille organised by the Joint Secretariat of the Interreg EURO-Med programme, which gathered the Governance projects of the four missions. The Meetings were rich and fruitful in terms of joint work and collaboration, outlining the shared challenges the projects face across missions and the many opportunities to join forces in building a successful new edition of the MED Academy, among others.

The C4LA (Community for Living Areas) project, which is animating and coordinating a large community of 19 thematic projects across 5 working groups related to the green transition of urban spaces in the Med region, and for which MedCities is leading the transferring work Package, shared its tools to map relevant stakeholders in a joint venture with the D4LA without compromising the GDPR. We participated in the discussions about the future edition of the MEDAcademy – on which MedCities will make sure to call for contributions within our network and to facilitate the participation of our members. The C4LA partnership gathered internally to plan the future activities of a busy autumn, with its next annual community event being held in Barcelona next May 2024. It also met with other peer projects from other Communities to discuss the relations with the community projects and their mobilisation, among others, and met its governance sister project, the Institutional Dialogue Project, to plant the joint activities both projects need to work together on.

The C4N project shared the join approach and work of both governance projects under the Mission for Nature (M4N) and the setup of the Mission’s amplification room as a space of peer to peer collaboration, expert engagement, and service provision under the 4 Working Groups of the Mission open at different levels to the 13 current Thematic Projects, project associated partners and external stakeholders. MedCites leads Working Group 2 on “Overcoming local barriers to climate change adaptation”.

The partnership shared its next steps a capacity-building webinar of the 4 working groups in November to lead the development of a position paper on the recently approved EU Restoration Law to be validated at the annual Institutional Dialogue on the next 28 and 29 of November in Málaga.