EU Project Office & Financing biodiversity
The first objective of this theme is to set up a Belgian team of EU project experts to facilitate the drafting of EU project proposals (LIFE, Interreg, Horizon Europe, Erasmus +, etc.). This will be done in three ways:
Drafting proposals:
The objective is to submit at least 3 proposals/year (24 proposals submitted within the project duration). We expect to increase our success ratio from 20% to 30% meaning that a total of 7-8 applications would be successful. On average, the total budget of each application will be 7 million euro and thus in total we expect to mobilise an additional 49 million euro. These projects will be closely linked to the different LIFE Belgium for Biodivesity processes and tasks.
Providing support to stakeholders to draft proposals:
In addition to drafting these projects, the team will also liaise and support stakeholders to submit EU funded projects by providing advice and guidance. Depending on the needs, members of the EU project office can provide training as well (webinar, info-day, etc.).
Creating a pool of fundraising experts from all project partners, to increase collaboration and coordination for successful project development:
These experts have all their own personal EU network. This offers the opportunity to liaise with more other MS to prepare projects with common goals and create more EU leverage to take the necessary measures at EU level in favour of habitats and species (cf. biogeographical level, migratory species, transboundary environmental threats).
The EU project office and financing team will work in close collaboration with all regions and the federal state. This should result in mobilising additonal complementary funding. All partners contribute to the EU project office depending on their interest and involvement in a project proposal. In total at least 7 successful applications are expected for a total budget of 49 million euro within LIFE, Interreg, Horizon Europe, ESF programmes, etc.In addition, this EU project office can also mobilise additional complementary funding of non-EU related funds (e.g., international funds, private funds, etc.). This will be a very important task to create leverage and add substantially to the implementation of the Prioritised action Frameworks or PAFs.
In addition this EU office team will further explore new innovative financing mechanisms, mainly outside the scope of public funding. This is necessary because there is a huge financial gap between what is necessary and available public funding (EU, national and regional funding). This innovative approach should create a leverage and lead to an even faster implementation of measures to combat biodiversity loss.