Cities in Europe and Latin America share urgent global-local challenges to integrate practical actions with strategies to achieve greater inclusion, biodiversity, adaptation to climate change and environmental quality. CONEXUS brings together community, private, public and academic partners to experiment with new methods of co-production in order to deliver innovative NBS in ‘Life-Lab’ pilots, using a place-based approach to solve problems together with citizens. The combined palette of sociocultural, ecological and governance contexts presents the opportunity to move faster together, and to inform changes in urban policy and practice.