Invest4Nature at the NATURANCE Festival: Insights, Engagement & Impact

February 12, 2026 | News

On the 3-5th February 2026 Invest4Nature collaborated with NATURANCE in their Finance Innovation Festival in Brussels. The event finally came to fruition after months of preparation, bringing together stakeholders from across Europe to discuss how we can steer investments into nature-based resilience.

Among the many highlights, the second day stood out for its highly interactive format: featuring an engaging mix of break-out rooms, group exercises, workshops, and sessions showcasing on research and outputs from fellow NbS projects. The World-Cafe style exchanges enriched the content further by bringing perspectives from communities of practice. Even when discussions became dense, they remained lively and productive, underscoring how engaged the broader NbS community is.

Takeaways

The festival made clear that biodiversity and climate change are no longer viewed only as environmental or social concerns, but also represent material and financial risks. Sessions illustrated how representatives from the financial sector like banks and insurers are increasingly recognising biodiversity loss as a factor that significantly affects their ‘business-as-usual’.

The abundance of contributions on nature credits, insurance solutions, bonds, and other innovative revenue models show that they are gaining traction in the field. This align strongly with Invest4Nature’s work in quantifying the benefits and cost of NbS as it paves new pathways for NbS financing from beyond the public sector.

A prominent takeaway, as expressed by Invest4Nature’s Marianne Zandersen from Aarhus University, was the need to shift insurance from reactive to proactive, and to redesign economic systems to enable landscape‑scale NbS integration. Europe is a climate‑vulnerable continent, and current risk governance frameworks are not yet prepared to manage the challenges ahead. She notes how, this transition requires a systems‑level response.

Mette Holm from the Aarhus Living Lab also shares some of her reflections: “Discussions around insurability also demonstrated how challenging it is to insure against the accelerating climate risks Europe is already facing, but it was refreshing to hear honest reflections on practicalities, politics, and the EU’s role in shaping future insurance models.”

In this context, NbS are increasingly viewed as a financially relevant risk-reduction solution. The research outputs of Invest4Nature: our tools, briefs, and Living Lab insights serve as valuable stepping stones, since credible evidence and robust data are essential for unlocking capital. Scaling NbS depends on coordinated action across multiple sectors, with the insurance and regulatory sectors as pivotal levers.

“One Euro invested in NbS and this in prevention measures for the biodiversity and climate crisis, can save a much higher sum of damage following floods or economic losses from the next heatwave“, as Lydia Lienhart summarised.

Where Invest4Nature featured in the festival programme

Capital for Nature: Investment Solutions Session

Invest4Nature held a marketplace-style session with:

• The game “You are the investor! Funding Challenge” – a hands on game that introduced participants to NbS financing, prompting reflection on what drives investability
• A showcase of the policy briefs, summarising key Invest4Nature findings and presenting the recently launched Invest4Nature Workspace
• A demonstration of the Invest4Nature NbS Decision Support Toolbox, including the Cost-Benefit Analyzer, NbS Performance Assessment, and NbS Recommender System.

The game provided valuable insights into knowledge gaps that exist when considering NbS Investments, and offered a practical entry point into how the Toolbox can address them. The game echoed the festival’s overall experience: high enthusiasm, rich insights, and evidence that well‑structured prompts work better than overly complex ones.

Collective Insights, Lasting Impact: Financing and Insurance for NbS Session

This session put in the foreground the legacy policy recommendation from fellow NbS projects SOTERIA, PIISA, and CLIMATEFIT. Representing Invest4Nature, Lydia Lienhart (Joanneum Research) presented findings from the policy brief: Unlocking Private Capital for NbS: Insights from the Invest4Nature Survey, outlining recommendations at local, national, and EU levels based on barriers and enablers identified by private sector respondents.

Seeds of Change: Citizens & Cities Session

The NbS case and initiative from Aarhus Municipality: Aarhus Water & Nature Parks: Welfare economic assessment, part of the Invest4Nature’s Living Lab NbS cases – was highlighted as a strong example of citizen and stakeholder engagement in urban NbS implementation. The NbS initiatives illustrated in poster form presented a wonderfully visual display of different initiatives from across Europe and beyond.

Taken together, the festival highlighted an accelerating shift: NbS are becoming central to risk management, regulation, finance, and urban resilience. Across discussions on material financial risk, proactive insurance, nature credits, welfare‑economic assessment, and local stakeholder engagement, a consistent need emerged — robust, credible, and comparable evidence.

This is precisely where Invest4Nature plays a transformative role. Through its Decision Support Toolbox, economic evidence base, policy briefs, and Living Lab demonstrations, I4N provides the methodologies, data, and practical examples that help financial actors, insurers, municipalities, and EU policymakers navigate the transition toward nature‑positive finance. As Europe confronts escalating climate and biodiversity risks, Invest4Nature’s integrated scientific, economic, and policy insights will remain essential building blocks for the systemic change ahead