Sep 14, Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund for Anyone Directly Involved in Species Conservation

During 2023 the Fund will be trialling a process whereby the Fund awards grants for the conservation of threatened soil species. To submit an application for a threatened soil species please select “MBZ Special Focus” under “Species Type” in section 5.1 of the application form. This is in addition to the usual grants awarded.

Thank you for your interest in the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund.

The Fund has been established 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. Its 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.

Grants will be awarded based on their ability to meet criteria pre-determined by the Species Fund, and are for maximum of $25,000 for each project.

You can complete and submit the application online by clicking here. Before starting an application, please ensure that you have read and understood the application criteria (especially relating to the species conservation status) and have had a look at the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Fund’s website.

Once your application has been submitted you will receive an automated email acknowledging receipt of your application, which will also contain log in details.

There are three grant rounds per year, and generally applications received before the end of February will receive a reply at the end of April or early May. The next submission deadline will be the last day of June, (and applicants will receive a reply in September). The final round of grants in a given year usually has a deadline of the end of October, with applicants receiving a repsonse in late December of the same year or early January of the following year.

For exact timings and details, please visit the Timetable page. Please do not leave it until the last minute to submit your application but do so well ahead of the deadline.

Please note that this is a very competitive process and sadly the vast majority of applicants do not receive grants. The Fund has limited amounts of money to spend each year and receives far more applications for good projects than could possibly be supported. In 2019 only 12% of applicants received any kind of a grant, and around 1,500 were turned down.

Criteria

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, so please find below some criteria and guidelines which would be useful to bear in mind when submitting an application.

Language: Applications must be submitted in English.

Currency: Budgets must be submitted in US Dollars.

Maximum Grant: 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.

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.

The Fund will use the IUCN Redlist (www.iucnredlist.org) as the primary guide to the conservation status of a given species, although documented variations for sub-species, distinct populations and sub-populations will be taken into account. For those species not assessed through the IUCN Redlist we welcome other methods of assessment and the submission of quantative data to confirm a species status.

Generally the Fund gives priority to those species facing a hight threat of extinction (with an emphasis on Endangered and Critically Endangered species), as well as those which are listed as Data Deficient or unlisted but are suspected as highly threatened.

Please ensure that the conservation status mentioned in the application is correct and cross-referenced to a website or publication. It might be of use to consult with the relevant IUCN/SSC Specialist Group if you are in doubt or would like some guidance.

Please note that applications with clearly incorrect conservation status and no justification will NOT be considered for funding.

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.

In situ conservation: Generally the Fund is primarily interested in providing support to in situ conservation work in the field (such as survey work and data gathering, direct action, recovery management, training and the like), focusing on the species in its natural habitat. However, the importance of ex situ work (genetic analysis, workshops, ex situ populations etc) is also recognised, and so a few grants may be given to projects which focus on ex situ conservation work in certain circumstances.

Core costs: The Fund will not contribute to the core running costs of an organisation or administrative overheads, and yet does recognise that sometimes support salaries, stipends, per diems and project related living costs can be a vital part of in situ conservation work.

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.

Grant amount: The Fund will not provide a grant of more than $25,000.

Grants for continuation: The Fund is happy to provide continuation support for a project which had previously been supported, which is now completed and for which the Fund has received all required reporting by the time of the respective submission deadline.

How to Apply

For more information and job application details, see; Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund for Anyone Directly Involved in Species Conservation

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