Deadline: 20-Jul-23

Applications are now open for The Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate Grant Programme to unlock the potential of nature to deliver climate solutions and improve livelihoods.

The GCBC was announced by Lord Goldsmith at COP26 with £40m of UK International Development funding.  It contributes to the UK Government’s commitment to spend £3bn of its £11.6bn of international climate finance on nature and biodiversity over the 5 years to 2026.

In 2023 the world reaches the halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but progress is significantly off track and the world is facing a dual climate and biodiversity crisis.   With global warming already at 1.1°C and predicted to reach at least 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052, they can expect a higher frequency of extreme temperatures, drought, and extreme weather events.  At the same time around 25% of plant and animal species are threatened by human actions, with a million species facing extinction.  The impacts will make delivery of the SDGs more difficult, and they will hit the poorest first and hardest.

The GCBC aims to build on the outcomes of the Dasgupta Review and help countries to achieve a nature-positive future by supporting commitments made by the UK government at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference and the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference, as well as supporting delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate (GCBC) is a UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) programme that funds research into natural solutions to climate change and poverty. By working in partnership with scientists, academics, and research institutions in the Global South, they seek to develop scalable approaches to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity that delivers climate solutions and improves livelihoods. The GCBC is funded by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and managed in partnership with DAI Global and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (RBG Kew).

The GCBC will help to address this by funding research into how the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity can help address climate change and improve livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.  The research funded through the GCBC will be:

• Interdisciplinary – They work across research disciplines, breaking down silos and bringing researchers together.
• Collaborative – They work in partnership with recipient countries to create new ways of working and new knowledge.
• Equitable -They value local and traditional knowledge and use it to develop appropriate, scalable solutions to tackle biodiversity loss, climate vulnerability and poverty.

Thematic Areas

• The GCBC will launch a series of grant calls each focused on a different thematic area or areas of research. They expect these to address issues relating to:
  • key pressures causing serious negative impacts to livelihoods, nature and climate such as agriculture and food systems, and natural resource management
  • enablers of change – instruments, data, incentives, finance and governance – required to benefit livelihoods, nature and climate
  • evidence gaps the targeting of which will increase uptake of solutions and interventions to address the causes and consequences of poverty, biodiversity loss and climate change

Eligibility Criteria

• The geographic focus of the GCBC’s research will be Official Development Assistance-eligible countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and South East Asia and the Pacific.

For more information, visit Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate.