Various Climate Funding Opportunities

NOAA has compiled a list of Climate Funding Opportunities.  This document provides a snapshot of currently available, climate-related funding opportunities from NSF, NOAA, EPA, Fish and Wildlife, USGS, FEMA and various private foundations (as of June 3, 2013). 

Climate Funding Opportunities

Enhancing Developmental Biology Research at Undergraduate Institutions Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15)

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) issued by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) encourages grant applications to strengthen the developmental biology research environment at educational institutions that provide baccalaureate or advanced degrees, but that have not been major recipients of NIH support. In addition, this FOA attempts to foster the development of novel or underutilized experimental model systems, and to motivate students through exposure to and participation in research projects designed to study fundamental processes underlying normal development.

Deadline: September 10, 2014

Award amount: Applicants may request a maximum of $300,000 total direct costs plus applicable Facilities & Administrative (F&A)/indirect costs for the entire project period of up to three years.  

Read full solicitation

Procter & Gamble Higher Education Grant Program

The Procter & Gamble Fund Higher Education Grant Program has been established to provide support for efforts of regionally accredited U.S. colleges and universities that will better prepare students for success in business. Grants will be provided for specific projects or programs, not for operating support. Examples of eligible projects include, but are not limited to, improving curriculum to be at the cutting edge in relevance and effectiveness; fostering and enabling leadership opportunities and learning; creating a learning environment that encourages and enhances innovation and creativity; and strengthening diversity in thought, participation and ongoing interaction. 

Award amount: $5,000 to $10,000

Submission Date: July 1 - September 30 

Read full solicitation

NSF Water Sustainability and Climate (WSC)

Research proposals under the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Water Sustainability and Climate program are now being accepted. 

Water Sustainability and Climate Program (WSC): One of the most urgent challenges facing the world today is to ensure an adequate supply and quality of water in light of both burgeoning human needs and increasing climate variability and change. Despite the importance of water to life on Earth, there are major gaps in our basic understanding of water availability, quality and dynamics, and the impact of both human activity and a changing and variable climate on the water system. The goal of the Water Sustainability and Climate (WSC) solicitation is to enhance the understanding and predict the interactions between the water system and land use changes (including agriculture, managed forest and rangeland systems), the built environment, ecosystem function and services and climate change/variability through place-based research and integrative models. 

Deadline: September 10, 2013

Link to full solicitation

Grants for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

The Graham Foundation makes project-based grants to individuals and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Architecture and related spatial practices engage a wide range of cultural, social, political, technological, environmental, and aesthetic issues. The foundation is interested in projects that investigate the contemporary condition, expand historical perspectives, or explore the future of architecture and the designed environment. The foundation supports innovative, thought-provoking investigations in architecture; architectural history, theory, and criticism; design; engineering; landscape architecture; urban planning; urban studies; visual arts; and related fields of inquiry. The foundation's interest also extends to work being done in the fine arts, humanities, and sciences that expands the boundaries of thinking about architecture and space. 

Award limit: $20,000
Deadline: September 15, 2013

Read full solicitation.

Education Research Grants

Education Research Grants from the National Center for Education Research (NCER) will consider only applications that address one of the following topics: cognition and student learning; early learning programs and policies; education technology; effective teachers and effective teaching; English learners; improving education systems: policies, organization, management, and leadership; mathematics and science education; postsecondary and adult education; reading and writing; social and behavioral context for academic learning. 

Deadline: September 4, 2013
Award limit: $100,000

Read full solicitation here.

Not Safe For Funding: The NSF and the Economics of Science

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, introduced a divisive new bill, the High Quality Research Act, that would change the criteria by which the National Science Foundation evaluates research projects and awards funding. (The N.S.F., with a budget of seven billion dollars, funds roughly twenty per cent of federally supported basic research in American universities.) Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week that “adding Congress as reviewers is a mistake.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson warned more forcefully that Representative Smith was “sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review.” But in a statement, Representative Smith said the draft bill “improves on [the peer-review process] by adding a layer of accountability.” The bill’s new three-point criteria for funding require that a project be “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense”; solve “problems that are of the utmost importance to society at large”; and not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Read the full The New Yorker article