Defra funding: Environmental Monitoring Innovation

• Competition opens: Monday 22 January 2024
• Competition closes: Wednesday 6 March 2024 11:00am

UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £5 million for collaborative projects to develop innovative solutions in environmental monitoring. 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. We 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

Your project must focus on one or more of the following challenge areas:

• biodiversity and natural capital
• soil health (including measuring soil carbon)
• water quality
• greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia emissions from Defra sectors

Your project’s total costs must be between £150,000 and £450,000. Find out more and apply by 11am on 6 March 2023.