Deadline: 30-Jun-23

The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund (MBZ) is now open for applications to provide targeted grants to individual species conservation initiatives, recognize leaders in the field and elevate the importance of species in the broader conservation debate.

The Fund focus is global and eligibility for grants will extend to all plant, animal and fungi species conservation efforts, without discrimination on the basis of region or selected species. However, it is very competitive indeed with only around 12% of applicants in 2019 receiving a grant.

Funding Information

• The Fund maximum grant size is $25,000, and any application asking for more than this from the Fund will be rejected. The total budget of a project can be higher if there are other sources of funding.

Eligible Expenses

• Depending on the type of conservation project and the work involved, the Fund will consider covering salary expenses or travel costs for a specific project. This would usually be for support staff in developing countries. However this can only be as part of the overall grant as officially applied for. The Fund will not consider applications for grants which only cover salary or travel expenses.

Eligibility Criteria

• Anyone directly involved in species conservation can apply to the Fund for a grant.
• Language: Applications must be submitted in English.
• Currency: Budgets must be submitted in US Dollars.
• The Fund intends to be as flexible and accommodating as possible when reviewing applications, and to take into account as many different factors as is reasonable when assessing the merit of a suggested project. To support this and to try to streamline the application process, the review process is kept comparatively simple.
• However, the Fund does receive many more applications for support than grants could possibly be provided,
• Conservation status: The Fund was established to support species conservation work, and so if your project is not about an endangered species it is probably not worth your while submitting an application.
• Content: Text provided in an application should be kept concise and clear, with clearly stated quantative goals, aims and methods. When writing an application, please bear in mind that there is only so much text which the Advisory Board and the Fund’s board of directors are capable of reading. Priority will be given to those projects that support the professional development of young conservationists.
• Species: Generally the Fund would prefer to support projects which focus on a single species, but it also recognises that in some geographic and taxonomic circumstances it makes more sense to group a number of species.

For more information, visit Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund.