Introducing our Round two Carbon Innovation Fund partners – Co-op Foundation

Introducing our Round two Carbon Innovation Fund partners - Co-op Foundation

Today, I’m pleased to announce seven new Carbon Innovation Fund partners, which are trialling exciting and innovative solutions to create a better, more resilient food and farming system. Our new partners, from across the UK, are experimenting with an array of projects from sources as diverse as human urine, mollusc shells and seaweed. 

We made some changes to the application criteria for the second round of our £3.5m Carbon Innovation Fund, incorporating learning from our first round of funding last year. We decided to take a more focused approach to help UK farmers reduce their reliance on soy-containing animal feed and synthetic fertilisers. The projects we’ve chosen to fund hope to improve farming resilience in the UK, creating more sustainable communities. 

Our partnership with Co-op 

We’ve awarded over £1m from this round of grant-making from our largest environmental partnership with Co-op, in addition to the £1.4m from Round one. CIF is funded through Co-op donations from the sale of compostable carrier bags in the UK, as well as the Foundation’s own funds. 

We’re excited to be working with organisations committed to revolutionising the way that we farm, who are reducing carbon emissions and share our commitment to sharing learning. 

Welcome to our new CIF partners – we can’t wait to work with you! 

Our new partners 

Our fund builds upon our aim to create more sustainable communities, as part of our new strategy, ‘Building communities of the future together’. It is also an intrinsic part of Co-op’s Climate Plan, which acknowledges and responds to the current climate emergency, and its vision of ‘Co-operating for a fairer world’ 

Let me introduce you now to our incredible new partners:

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