Another great partnership between Sense-Lab and Boticario Group Foundation (FGB) happened in 2019. The focus wass the Guanabara Bay Hydrographic Region! The objective was to identify ways of conserving and recovering the territory's natural areas looking at Nature-Based Solutions, to strengthen water security and coastal-marine resilience in the Guanabara Bay region. Faced with this challenge, FGB invited Sense-Lab to think of a way to do this. Sense-Lab's proposal was bold and FGB agreed! How about creating a multi-actor innovation laboratory? This is how Oasis Lab Guanabara Bay was born. To implement this idea, FGB joined forces with the Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Firjan) and the State Institute of the Environment (Inea).
The main difference of a Multi-Actor Innovation Lab is the engagement of several actors to develop cooperation initiatives – new or existing. Looking at the context and challenges of the Guanabara Bay Hydrographic Region, Oasis Lab proposes to leverage innovation and broad collaboration networks for the development of integrated projects with the potential to generate systemic changes. This was done through conversations, co-creation, contact networks and new governance between the actors involved.
Guanabara Bay is one of the main symbols of Rio de Janeiro and of extreme social and economic importance for the State. Unfortunately, for centuries it has been suffering from a huge environmental imbalance that leads to many losses and problems, such as: water scarcity, flooding, urban expansion, pollution, reduction of fishing stocks, degradation of coastal ecosystems, extreme weather events, among many others.
Sense-Lab's joint work with FGB, Firjan and INEA began with an in-depth diagnosis to understand the scenario and identify the main challenges facing Guanabara Bay. A second step was to map multi-sector actors operating in the territory with potential contribution to the Lab. More than 169 actors were mapped and 102 signed up to participate in the Oásis Lab.
On the 1st and 2nd August of 2019, the first meeting of the Oásis Lab Baía de Guanabara took place, at Casa Firjan and we had 80 actors representing 65 multisectoral organizations.
For two days we had the opportunity to experience rich contributions and exchanges that emerged from a diverse group, which makes Oásis Lab an initiative supported by a systemic vision, through dialogue and collective wisdom to drive the change we want to see in Guanabara Bay .
Based on a joint understanding of the context and challenges of this region and good conversations, we reached the end of the meeting with 10 suggestions for co-created projects, looking at the potential of Nature-Based Solutions as an instrument for change. The objective is to pilot prototypes of these projects that have been emerging from Oásis Lab for three months and, to this end, Sense-Lab provides full mentoring and facilitation support. On September 2nd, another network meeting took place, with the working groups delving deeper into the prototypes and putting together the projects' Theory of Change.
During the year, many good conversations took place through face-to-face meetings of the Oásis Lab network, webinars, connections and mentoring that helped groups run prototypes and, after testing, be able to enhance the projects and implement them!
We are confident and eager to see the long-term results. We believe that by uniting multidisciplinary agents and diverse expertise we have in our hands, in addition to a wealth of knowledge, a strength and enormous potential to promote the transformation that we are proposing, through the Oásis Lab Guanabara Bay.