JUSTNature 1st Local Stakeholder Workshop

24 February 2023, members of the Research Innovation Unit (RIU), on behalf of the Gzira Local Council and the University of Malta (UM), conducted the first local stakeholder meeting of the European Commission Horizon 2020 JUSTNature project under the patronage of the Mayor, Dr Conrad Borg Manche.

The freshly renovated Education, Arts and Culture hall (aka Arts and Crafts) at Savoy Gardens of the Gzira Local Council hosted 20+ stakeholders. These consisted of residents, experts from various fields of research, and members from Infrastructure Malta (IM) and the Environment Resources Authority (ERA). Throughout the first stakeholders’ workshop, the attendees actively co-designed nature-based solutions for the locality of Gzira, focusing on the pilot area of JUSTNature Sliema Road. Gzira’s ultra-dense, basin-type locality greatly challenges accomplishing the EU Green Deal mandate. Its population density, intense land traffic, related poor air quality and pollutants, lack of open spaces, lack of greening, and street canyons, collectively amplify the effects of Urban Heat Island (UHI). In Gzira, UHI is found to be 5.8 degrees Celsius hotter than Wied Ghollieqa (a natural rural valley boarder with Gzira) during sunny days and about 2.7 degrees Celsius hotter during night time.

The stakeholder workshop was conducted in two phases over 2 hours. Shirley Attard of the RIU and Mohamed Soliman Daoud of UM hosted the workshop, introduced the aims and objectives of JUSTNature, and gave insights on the co-designing and co-creation exercise of the workshop.

Fabian Borg, Head of RIU, addressed burning questions that condition the well-being of residents, saliently those within the Eastern and Port Region, to focus on Gzira. Borg inaugurated RIU’s latest interactive web app that exposes the Urban Heat Island of Malta based on the methodologies identified by the award-winning scientific and operational framework PHASE 1 (PH-1).

With these insights, the attendees identified the (in-)justice/challenges and Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for the locality of Gzira. For this workshop, the attendees split into two groups whereby they placed JUSTNature tokens representing justices and injustices identified over two large format basemap prints of the locality of Gzira. Members from ERA provided their expertise to those in attendance during this workshop.

Dr Edward Duca of UM gave insights on varied types of Nature Based Solutions that could be implemented in the micro context due to the lack of open spaces within the locality of Gzira.

Architect Walter Portelli, Head of Implementation – Major Projects of Infrastructure Malta, presented a work-in-progress street plan of Triq Sliema, the leading pilot site of the JUSTNature project, which includes plans to accommodate the co-created and co-designed nature-based solutions within this street.

Organising a stakeholder workshop of this calibre requires a considerable logistical process and the input of many that are not mentioned here. High-level separate meetings were held before the public workshop with Infrastructure Malta and the Environment Resources Authority. RIU interns physically scouted the locality for stakeholders and also conducted audio interviews seeking residents’ Lived Experiences. Team members from RIU and UM assisted in setting up the workshop, taking minutes for post-mortem analyses, photos and videos. We thank all who actively participated and contributed, including our JUSTNature consortium partners who prepared tokens and frameworks for this workshop.