Every year, the Natural Heritage Mission runs an awareness-raising and external communication campaign on a major environmental protection challenge in the Mediterranean: ‘Solve the Challenge’.
The concept is simple and effective: create contents and events tailored to all kinds of audiences, from schoolchildren to policymakers, to foster a shared understanding of the challenges across the Programme’s cooperation area.
What is ‘solve the challenge’?
‘Solve the Challenge’ structures the Natural Heritage Mission’s communication over the second half of each year:
- Online, the Mission’s social media channels (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube) publish posts, articles, carousels, videos, quizzes and games;
- Offline, the field campaign takes place as close as possible to the issues at stake: eroding coastlines, restored wetlands, national parks, but also conference halls and university lecture theatres.
On these environmental issues, ‘Solve the Challenge’ seeks to convey a positive, action-oriented message.
‘Solve the Challenge is a gateway, a way of attracting people so that they can see what we do and understand how the Mission contributes to protecting our natural heritage’ explains Caterina Pratico, of CONISMA, Community4Nature governance project coordinator.
Over the years, as the Mission’s thematic projects have developed their solutions, the campaign has increasingly featured them. ‘The campaign also aims to amplify the impact of the solutions developed by our thematic projects. That is why we involve all partners in discussing, planning and implementing the campaign activities’ she adds
Missions? Thematic projects? A quick reminder!
The Natural Heritage Mission currently comprises 21 thematic projects, which are delivering results on the ground. It is managed by two governance projects, tasked with bringing the thematic project community to life and turning their results into public policy recommendations.
It is these governance projects that came up with ‘Solve the Challenge’ and now coordinate it.
Constantly evolving online and offline formats
On the Mission’s social media accounts, these contents have racked up around 15,000 views in 2024 and 20,000 in 2025, and provisional 2026 figures (the campaign is under way) are on the rise.
Solve the Challenge campaigns
Event formats have evolved over time while keeping a common thread: a presence on the ground and the involvement of thematic projects.
- Thus, during the campaign’s first edition in 2023, a field visit organised in Mataró, Spain, brought together experts, policymakers and the general public around the reality of coastal erosion. It was labelled by the EU Green Week and the European Maritime Days.
- The following year, the campaign shifted up a gear with six national information days organised in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Portugal, each attracting up to several hundred participants.
- In parallel, the involvement of thematic projects has grown steadily. In 2025, the environmental governance theme was chosen collectively and volunteer projects were called on to produce editorial content. In 2026, some twenty videos were filmed during the annual Community meeting in Lisbon.
‘Every year, we keep testing new formats for our campaign and, above all, we try to link the online world with the field, being close to our public’, notes Vera Bougiouri, of the National Technical University of Athens. ‘In 2023, in Catalonia, we met people directly involved in coastal erosion and enjoyed strong media coverage’ [Editor’s note: more than 30 articles appeared in press during the campaign].
‘In 2024, in Greece, we paid visits with ARTEMIS and FRED projects representatives to three high-schools informing more than 500 students about nature restoration practices. In Bulgaria, along with the Wetland4Change project, we met with local and regional authorities. These are human and political contacts that nothing can replace.’
Mobilising the cooperation ecosystem on topical issues
But the campaign also helps to feed back into policies. In 2025, the two strategic territorial projects of the Natural Heritage Mission selected under our 5th Call for projects (WatHer and RedeeM) started developing solutions for water resource management. They are therefore particularly active in the 2026 campaign.
On 30 September 2026, they took part – alongside two water-related projects from the Innovative Sustainable Economy mission – in a session of the Euro-Mediterranean Water Forum, which brought several thousand participants to Rome. Their goal? To show how their experiences can inform local, national and European policy and governance frameworks.
And the Natural Heritage Mission, along with the WatHer project, is not stopping there: in the next months, it will bring together the Italian ministries of agriculture, culture and environment to advocate for the recognition of traditional water management practices as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.
More than a communication campaign, this is also a campaign of influence.
Highlights from ‘Solve the Challenge’
When we asked our three interviewees about their favourite moments across the various Solve the Challenge editions, many events came to mind.
For Gina Apostolaki, it was a visit to Škocjanski Zatok Nature Reserve, in Slovenia, in June 2024, at the time of the adoption of the Nature Restoration Regulation.‘Our host learnt from us that the regulation has just been adopted by the EU Council. She was so happy that she almost burst into tears’ she recalls. ‘These human moments, these encounters, inevitably stay with you.’
For Vera Bougiouri, the interviews conducted this year on the water crisis were a standout moment. But another memory stands out even more. ‘I remember organising Infodays for high school students in autumn 2024 on the challenge of nature restoration. In one of the schools and after our presentations, students asked us a simple question: What shall we study to do this job (e.g. restore Posidonia oceanica)? This is what I love doing! Inspiring youth to restore nature!’
Caterina Pratico, for her part, is looking to the future, with the exhibition the Mission will organise as part of the ‘A Mediterranean Journey’ event hosted by the Programme on 25 and 26 November in Marseille. This exhibition on “Water Crisis” is the closure of the 2026 ‘Solve the Challenge’ campaign. ‘This will be a great moment to speak to the wider Euro-MED community and reach a bigger audience. I am really looking forward to it!’
Join us at the event to meet the projects and the managers of the Natural Heritage Mission. A dedicated conference, exhibition and activity space will be theirs!
