US Natural Climate Solutions Accelerator Launch
The Nature Conservancy is now launching a new Accelerator grant program focused on Natural Climate Solutions in the United States. The Conservancy is partnering with the American Forest Foundation (AFF), American Forests (AF), the United States Forest Service (USFS) and Duke University to help catalyze new approaches to restoring degraded ecosystems that will deliver tangible, landscape-scale climate
mitigation benefits as well as complementary environmental, economic, and social co-benefits.
Program Details
The US NCS Accelerator will identify and provide funding ($50-300k) to an initial set of three to five early-stage projects with significant potential to unlock landscape-scale deployment of natural climate solutions, including reforestation, improved forest management, and other opportunities for restoring degraded lands to maximize climate change mitigation and associated co-benefits.
The term for this first round of US NCS Accelerator grants will be 18 months. During this time, grantees will be expected to complete projects, achieve proofs-of-concept or accomplish other proposed tasks that will allow for project evaluation, including potential scalability of the NCS approach, ability to quantify climate change mitigation benefits and the ability to demonstrate the path forward for investors, businesses, nonprofits and/or policymakers
to aid in bringing the project concept to transformative scale. After the 18-month demonstration phase, we intend to identify the most promising projects, which may then be eligible for more significant funding, if available, through future grants or other investment vehicles.
Eligibility
The US NCS Accelerator intends to provide grants to U.S.-based non-profit conservation organizations with approved IRS 501(c)(3) status. Grants can be awarded for projects only within the 50 U.S. states and U.S. territories. The US NCS Accelerator is unable to make grants to for-profit corporations, individuals, universities, public agencies, municipalities or other types of government entities though we strongly support proposals from applicants that
partner with these other entities in a way that may assist in unlocking scale.
How to Apply
Please email NCSaccelerator@tnc.org to request the application. Submissions will be accepted through 11:59 PM EDT on July 22. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions.
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