Call for Proposals: Nature Finance Seed Corn Grants (UK)

Deadline: 7-Nov-21

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) have launched the Nature Finance Seed Corn Grants to engage the wider academic research community and resources within that community with the developing process of the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).

NERC will be supporting key research needs relevant to the priorities identified so far by TNFD and to inform through interdisciplinary and robust research evidence the development of TNFD process and activities.

Streams

Proposals are sought which address the three emerging TFND workstreams:

Financing the transition to an inclusive, sustainable, healthy food system: An urgent need for internalisation of nature is likely to widely impact production methods, changing asset prices (including land) and impacting employment and the availability of affordable nutrition, with positive and negative cascade effects over the entire food system.
Integrated Climate-Nature Transition Risk Framework: Research is required to build on the experience of climate transition pathways and initial work on nature positive linked financial risk assessment to invent, conceptualise and develop a framework on solid theoretical building blocks, with considered practical application for the policy, regulatory and financial communities.
Future of Nature Markets: They must develop and initiate ways to catalyse “nature markets” that correctly value nature, enable economic value to be created from nature on a sustainable basis, and are aligned to nature positive goals and outcomes.

Funding Information

NERC is contributing £700,000 in 2021/2022 to fund seed corn grants, to address research, evidence, data, knowledge, and methodology gaps relevant to the user and sector needs identified by TNFD. With a proposed duration of 3-4 months and a maximum budget of £50,000 each (at 80% FEC), these agile grants for evidence synthesis projects, feasibility, or scoping studies and/or pilot research projects that may lead to longer-term projects and for building networks.

Eligibility Criteria

Funds can be used to support:
- investigator time to plan and deliver the activities
- costs for professional facilitation, if required
- venue hire, travel and subsistence costs, if in-person activities are proposed
- consumables
- indirect and estates costs.
Standard NERC and UKRI eligibility rules apply. UKRI research and fellowship grants for all schemes may be held at:
- approved UK higher education institutions
- approved research council institutes
- independent research organisations
- public sector research establishments.
Each applicant can only apply for one award as Principal Investigator and one award as Co-investigator. Additionally, they would not expect more than one application per organisation per theme.
NERC will award this grant directly to a single lead organisation via a purchase order and UKRI standard terms and conditions will apply with some variation due to the method of payment. Invoices for payment must include:
- the purchase order number
- site address
- NERC’s address
- a unique invoice number