Environmental Fund – First call for projects

12 September 2014
Introduction
For each megawatt-hour sold as EKOenergy hydropower, a contribution of minimum €0,10 (ten eurocents) is paid into the EKOenergy Environmental Fund. The money of the EKOenergy Environmental Fund is used to finance measures that mitigate the adverse environmental effects of hydropower installations. During its history, the Fund has donated €600,000 to projects related to fish passes, fish pass research and river restorations. You can find more information about the previously funded projects here.
For this round, we are looking for projects in the countries where EKOenergy has been produced and where EKOenergy has been sold in 2013 and 2014. Most of the money will go to projects in Norway and Finland. We also accept small project proposals from Romania, Latvia and Iceland.
The amount to be granted is maximum €50,000. The project has to start in 2015, preferably in the first half of 2015.
Deadline for submission is 09 November 2014.
Contact: infoekoenergy.org
Our evaluation criteria
- Experience, solvency and reliability of the organisation (20%)
- Quality and efficiency of the project (20%): effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, impact and visibility, ownership, gender diversity
- Long term viability, sustainability and replicability of the project (20%)
- Contacts with local stakeholders, solid local counterpart (20%)
- Complementary goals with EKOenergy (20%): Share the goals of the coalition and specialise in promotion of river restoration and fish migration.
Send us your project
Submit your project proposal as a pdf of maximum 5 pages. The first proposal has to be in English, Finnish or Swedish. The EKOenergy Secretariat shortlists 5-10 best projects. The shortlisted projects will be sent to an external jury for evaluation. At this phase all proposals must be translated into English.
Annexes can be in any language, and can be longer than 5 pages. Send all documents to infoekoenergy.org.
The proposal has to contain the following information:
1. About yourself
- Which organisation will be in charge of the implementation of the project?
- Communication: preferably an organisation with a solid external communications strategy
- Experience: preferably having at least 5 years of previous experience of similar projects
- Having a transparent and audited book keeping
2. About the project(s)
- What projects would your organisation be able to set up in Finland or Norway with €50,000 or less? Which projects would you be able to implement in Iceland, Latvia or Romania with €5,000 or less?
- What are the positive environmental impacts of these projects in terms of mitigating negative impacts of hydropower production?
Please briefly refer to the following aspects
- Relevance of the project in terms of EU and national river basin management plans, especially as measures that improve the ecological state of rivers and riparian zones
- External communication strategy of project work and its results
- How will the project be followed up after finalisation?
Other information and guidelines
- Information you send us will be shared with evaluators and with the members of the network (34 NGOs of different European countries)
- If you e-mail us, and you don’t get a confirmation mail within 48 hours, please resend your mail.
- Please indicate clearly whom we should contact if we need additional information.
- With regard to auditing and reporting (once the project is finalised): The exact procedure will depend on the granted amount, and will be specified in the contract between EKOenergy and the selected organisation(s).
Our plan is to start up a project to recover salmon production in the river Sjundbyån a part of Sjundeå å, which is part of the Natura 2000 network.
With help of historical material Sjundby traditionsförening would like to restart the production of salmon in the stream of Sjundbyforsen. This activity was going on here in the 1930- ies and 1940 ies but was interrupted, not by the war but by the so called Porkala Parenthesis, a period of 11 years when the whole manor of Sjundby was leased as a military base to the Soviet Union.
Any help, comments or material to help us with the project, financing and application is highly appreciated.
If available, we would appreciate application instructions and evacuation criterias in swedish.
Best regards,
Sjundby traditionsförening
Dear friends,
Thanks for this reactions.
There are no other ‘application instructions’ than those mentioned in the text above. Send us maximum 5 pages. Remember to talk about all of the following aspects: 1) Experience, solvency and reliability of the organisation 2) Quality and efficiency of the project 3) Long term viability, sustainability and replicability of the project 4) Contacts with local stakeholders, 5) Complementary goals with EKOenergy. The text has to be written in such a way that it can convince a jury of people with different backgrounds.
Because most of the EKOenergy sales in 2014 happened in Finland, we want to involve Finnish sellers and consumers in the selection process. Therefore, we also allow proposals in Finnish and Swedish.
The call for projects has not yet been translated to Swedish. For all our translations, we are dependent on volunteers. We always use English as source language, and over 75 volunteer translators help us to translate these texts to more than 25 languages. Recently, most of them have concentrated on the translation of our EKOenergy Comic (https://www.ekoenergy.org/extras/ekoenergy-comic/). The Swedish translation of that comic is almost ready. And so are 16 other languages.
Let us know if there is anything else we can do,
Steven Vanholme
EKOenergy Secretariat
Thank you for this complementary information,
We will get back to you with our application.
Best regards,
Sjundby traditionsförening r.f