Funding Competition: Environmental Monitoring Innovation – UK

This funding is from Innovate UK and The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). This partnership funding is part of the Innovation in Environmental Monitoring programme.

The aim of this competition is to fund collaborative projects that develop environmental monitoring solutions to enable improved monitoring of environmental variables.

They are looking for projects that will:

• support the development of new sensing systems and monitoring capabilities that will either improve existing approaches or introduce new ones
• support the testing of these products, including ‘ground-truthing’ with existing monitoring regimes, verifying their accuracy and reliability, and potential for deployment at scale
• help the UK environmental monitoring sector in anticipating and responding to growing markets for environmental sensing, delivering economic growth to the UK
• deliver new and strengthened partnerships between academia, public and private sectors, and across disciplines, stimulating innovative approaches

Specific Themes

• Biodiversity and natural capital
  • improving the collection of balanced biodiversity data on the distribution and abundance of species
  • monitor the short and medium term trends in species and habitats following interventions that aim to improve biodiversity
  • improving the ability to measure habitat connectivity and species mobility at a landscape and national scale
• Soil carbon and soil health
  • Including organic and peat soils.
    • improved methods of monitoring, reporting and verification to carbon markets and other users, which can include the sequestration and flux of carbon in soils in suitable frequencies and scales
    • new approaches toward the measurement of the biological, chemical, and physical properties of soil
    • the integration of individual data flows to better understand soil interactions and properties
• Water quality
  • delivering low-cost, real-time measurement of key parameters in association with water quality and quantity
  • improving the accuracy and precision of field-based sensors, their maintenance and calibration
  • combining sensor networks and citizen science outputs to monitor and report multiple water quality parameters and optimise current monitoring regimes
• Greenhouse gases (GHG) and ammonia emissions from Defra sectors
  • improve the quality of contributions to the UK’s GHG inventory from landfill, agriculture, agroforestry, forestry, anaerobic digestion plants, wastewater treatment, estuarine and freshwater bodies across a range of site types, conditions, and seasons
  • develop new approaches to monitor ozone depleting substances and fluorinated gases, with the aim of improving current global coverage
  • develop innovative approaches to improving the frequency of monitoring, compiling and quality-assessing agricultural emissions, with cost-effective direct assessment approaches, for example, tall tower systems

Project Size

• Your project’s total costs must be between £150,000 and £450,000.

Projects they will not fund

• They are not funding projects that:
  • include marine monitoring
  • develop new sensing systems and capabilities that are unlikely to generate a viable business proposition
  • focus on the collection of new research or commercial data
  • do not focus on nitrogen-related pollutants
• If you are addressing GHGs, the scope is limited to nitrogen-related pollutants that deposit and impact biodiversity and ecosystem function.
• They cannot fund projects that are:
  • dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
  • dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Who can apply?

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • last between 3 and 18 months
    • carry out all of its project work in the UK
    • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
    • start by 1 August 2024
    • end by 31 January 2026
  • Projects must always start on the first of the month and this must be stated within your application. Your project start date will be reflected in your grant offer letter if you are successful.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in IFS.
• Non-funded partners
  • Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition. All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
  • You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. They will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
• Number of applications
  • A business can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in two further applications.
  • If a business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.