Deadline: 15-Mar-24
The Co-op Foundation is inviting applications for the Carbon Innovation Fund Round Three to support organisations finding new ways to grow food without damaging peatlands.
The Co-op Foundation three-year, £3.5m Carbon Innovation Fund is a partnership between The Co-op Foundation and the Co-op. It’s funded through Co-op donations raised from the sale of compostable carrier bags in the UK and their own Co-op Foundation funds.
For their pilot year of the Carbon Innovation Fund, they funded a broad range of amazing initiatives working to reduce the negative environmental impact of the food and farming sector. After review, reflection and advice from experts in the field, they decided that future rounds should take a more focused approach, allowing for better synergy between partners, and making it easier to share learning. As a result, the second round focussed on projects reducing the UK’s reliance on soy-containing feed and synthetic fertilisers.
For their third round of funding (CIF3), they want to focus on sustainable ways to create a thriving food and farming sector, without the need to damage important peat soils across the UK.
Why focus on peat?
- Co-op are proud to say that they were the first UK supermarket to ban peat-containing compost from shelves in 2021, focusing on peat-free alternatives only. But they know the work doesn’t stop there. Peat is deeply embedded as a growing medium within food and horticultural systems for many growers and all supermarkets. To protect the environment, they need to find sustainable solutions to make sure that peatlands are no longer damaged for their food and farming system to thrive. They want to do this by funding ideas that help to reduce or remove the need for peat within their food supply chains.
Why is peat important?
- Functioning peat bogs are an incredible ‘carbon sink’; when healthy, they can store up to 30 times more carbon per hectare than a healthy rainforest (Forest Carbon, 2023). And it doesn’t stop at carbon storage – protecting peatland also delivers additional environmental benefits including the protection of natural habitats for wildlife; improving water quality and reducing flood risk by regulating water flow.
- In the UK alone, an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon are stored in peatlands. However, with almost 80% of UK peatland degraded, it is believed that without any intervention to repair and preserve UK peatlands, their greenhouse gas emissions could exceed the equivalent of 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year (IUCN Peatland Programme).
- Peatland is often drained for farming practices such as growing crops and/or broken up to put the peat into compost as a growth aid within food growing. They recognise that this is a major issue to address to halt natural landscape degradation. As a result, they want to focus their funding on ways to protect peatland while still providing the food they need to eat.
Fund Aims
- The fund will aim to protect peatland by reducing reliance on peat in food supply chains. To achieve this impact the fund will:
- Invest in testing and scaling up of alternative solutions to peat-free or peat protecting food growing methods. This can include protecting peatland used for growing crops or for grazing livestock.
- Strengthen existing or create new networks and collaborations between farmers and other stakeholders that bring together solutions to common challenges
- Increase access to knowledge, techniques and skills for the UK farming community
- Increase farmers’ confidence, skills and knowledge to transition successfully into a new era of peat-free and/or peat-protecting growing
- Reduce costs for farmers, consumers and have positive impact on the environment through the adoption of alternative solutions to protect peatland
- Support work that may feel ‘risky’ for other funders e.g. because of the size of the organisation or because they have only conducted a pilot so far
Funding Information
- Applicants can apply for between £50,000 and £150,000 for their project.
Funding Criteria
- They have split their criteria into ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’.
- Essential:
- Awareness of how your work both reduces and emits greenhouse gasses (i.e. net GHG emissions): By preserving peatland, they know your work will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protect an essential natural landscape. However, the work you deliver is likely to also emit greenhouse gases, for example through imports of raw materials or energy use.
- Awareness of negative knock-on effects: They are conscious that often in the quest to solve one problem, there is a risk of creating another. Aside from GHG emissions they would like to get an idea of any adverse social or environmental consequences that you anticipate your work may have.
- Collaboration and co-operation: You can demonstrate how you will co-operate with others. This could be at any or every stage of your project. They are most interested in the inclusion of the target audience in the work you do, for example involving farmers in the production of a peat-alternative, but it could also look like engaging an academic centre or research institute to gather data.
- Sharing learning: It is essential that your learnings are made open-source, and your project does not involve any patent / intellectual property that will lead to private gain. They are looking for projects with a robust and extensive dissemination plan to share their work widely. They would like to get an idea of your plan to share learning throughout and/or at the end of your project.
- Desirable:
- Environmental benefits: They would like to know how your project might contribute environmental benefits beyond a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and how you might measure this. For example, increased local biodiversity measured using the biodiversity metric calculator tool.
- Human benefit: They are interested in projects that also benefit people. This section could relate to the general community, or a specific group of people. For example, providing employment, volunteering opportunities or a reduced cost of inputs for farmers.
- Scalability: They would be interested to understand how your work could be scaled up to increase impact and benefit, perhaps within retail food supply chains. They would be especially interested to see how initiatives take affordability into account when scaling up.
- Essential:
What types of projects would they support?
- They are looking to fund a range of different initiatives which can do one or more of the following:
- Reduce the amount of peat needed to grow crops within food supply chains
- Remove the peat needed to grow crops within food supply chains
- Sustainable management/looking after peat soils by using alternative, nondamaging farming methods for crops and/or livestock grazing
What can’t they fund?
- Using funding to purchase or use ready-made peat-free compost to use on your crops
- Projects which do not support food and farming of food (i.e. they cannot support projects focussing on bedding or pot plants)
- Projects focusing on peatland restoration only (with no element of farming for food involved. They do recognise the importance of this, and Co-op have partnered with RSPB on a large-scale peat restoration project).
- Policy and lobbying initiatives
- Brand new ideas, before any initial pilot or proof of concept
Eligibility Criteria
- Any type of organisation, of any size based in the UK is welcome to apply for the Carbon Innovation Fund. However, to be funded, they must:
- Evidence that work does not lead solely to private gain of wealth
- Commit to open-source sharing of information, processes and learnings (i.e. work is not protected by intellectual property rights)
- Be legally constituted, have a bank account in the organisation’s legal name
- Be able to evidence a pilot of the work they plan to carry out for their funded project. The organisation does not need to have carried out this pilot themselves.
- Carry out their proposed project in the UK
- They prefer that the funded organisation has at least two unconnected people on the board or management committee.
For more information, visit Co-op Foundation.