Today (08/06/23) is World Oceans Day! To celebrate the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund is delighted to publish our first Impact Report .The Report details all the funds SMEEF has raised and how that money has been spent. From sand dune restoration to seagrass nurseries. From blue carbon assessments to skate surveys. From puffins to petrels there is something in there for everyone!
Our work to increase available funding for all marine species and habitats in Scotland continues to go from strength to strength. If you would like to have a chat about what we do and how we do it then just drop me a line at manager@smeef.scot.
Sarah
The headlines!
The Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF) is a new financial tool designed to help bridge the green finance gap. So far it has raised £3.3m, with £2.9m coming from the Nature Restoration Fund, along with almost £400,000 from private finance (led by the offshore wind industry). The money has been distributed to 45 projects around Scotland, for example, the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust (HWDT) received £101,087 to purchase new survey equipment for their sailing vessel, allowing for the best quality data to be collected for years to come, as well as to revamp their citizen science reporting app, Whale Track.
Alison Lomax of HWDT said, “The funding allowed for the first substantial upgrade of the acoustic setup on Sv Silurian since HWDT’s acoustic monitoring began more than 20 years ago. It really has marked a transformative step-change in our capability to assess the changing soundscape of the west coast marine environment and unearth what is potentially causing barriers to nature recovery in Scotland’s seas.”
The SMEEF team would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our grant pot contributors – we really couldn’t do it without them and it has been great to work with them all. They are, in no particular order,
- Ørsted
- Scottish Power Renewables (UK) Limited
- Muir Mhor Offshore Wind Farm Limited (Fred Olsen Sea Wind & Vattenfall)
- Salamander Offshore Wind Farm (Simply Blue Energy (Scotland) Ltd & Ørsted)
- Stromar Offshore Wind Farm Limited (Ørsted, Blue Float and Renantis)
- Bellrock Offshore Wind Farm (Blue Float and Renantis)
- Broadshore Offshore Wind Farm (Blue Float and Renantis)
SMEEF is delighted to see all these creative and vital projects coming to life, supported with this innovative new type of funding and we know there are plenty more great projects out there that we would love to support – but we need more funds if we are going to scale up our efforts to recover nature in our seas. Please get in touch if you’d like to help!
SMEEF Impact Report – Final – 08 June 2023_w