Call for Proposals: The North Sea region as a lighthouse for sustainable shipping

Full proposals must be submitted through the Foundation’s application portal. 

After the deadline the Secretariat will conduct an initial review of all proposals to assess whether all necessary information and sections are included (see section “How to make your application”).

Qualified proposals will then be assessed by an external panel of scientific and science-to-policy experts based on the following criteria.

Criteria

• Alignment: Degree of alignment with the overarching key themes. 
• Relevance to national, regional, and international state-of-the-art research.
• Level of innovation: The novelty and feasibility of proposed solutions.
• Potential for sustainable impact and post-project anchoring.
• Relation to or overlap with existing initiatives.
• Relation to legal obligations of local, regional, or international authorities.
• Degree of stakeholder involvement.
• Qualifications and experience of applicants in relation to research goals.
• Appropriateness of budget in relation to project scope and themes.
• Collaborative capacity at national, regional, and international levels.
• Project relevance, necessity, and overall strengths and weaknesses. 

Project requirements, including budgets
 

• A project must have a duration of 3-5 years.
• Minimum grant size: 3 million DKK.
• Maximum grant size is 10 million DKK. Large budgets are expected to cover more themes. 
• Total framework: 29 million DKK. 
• Larger budgets must be clearly justified in relation to the tasks, cross‑border collaboration, and expected impact.
• The Foundation aims to support a balanced portfolio of projects across the priority areas.

Eligible applicants include universities and academic institutions, with a preference for interdisciplinary teams to reflect the complexity of the subject. The lead PI may be based outside a university or academic institution, provided that the organization is relevant for the objectives of the project, and provided that the project includes partners from university or academic institutions.

Other relevant actors essential to achieving the project’s purpose are also eligible.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Public authorities and government agencies.
• Research and knowledge institutions.
• Industry actors and practitioners.
• NGOs and civil society organisations.

In-kind contributions from relevant actors are encouraged. 

Collaboration and stakeholder engagement

Collaboration with industry experts, government authorities, and other key stakeholders is strongly encouraged to ensure diversity of perspectives and applicability of results, through creation of steering and/or advisory boards.

Geographic and sectoral scope

Projects involving partners from Denmark and other North Sea countries or from adjacent regional sea conventions as well as cross sectoral collaboration is also encouraged, as developments in shipping transcend administrative boundaries, national jurisdictions, and sea basin borders. 
 

Applicants may apply for: 

• Buyout/salary for practitioners, staff, researchers, and project management. Salary costs for permanent university researchers must not constitute a disproportionately large share of the total budget requested and must be justified in relation to the project’s aims (e.g. broader cross‑disciplinary work).
• PhD tuition fee, which is 80.000 DKK pr year.
• Project-specific costs in connection with activities, operations, meetings, conferences, publications, outreach activities, strengthened dissemination of results, anchoring of methods, etc.
• Project supplement to cover indirect project costs according to the agreement with Danish Universities (only applies to Danish Universities covered by the agreement).
• Administrative expenses for other project participants: Reasonable administrative expenses for project parties other than Danish universities covered by the agreement may be applied.

Note: Please read the guidance to the budget template within the budget template

Note: Wet Supplement and PhD/Postdoc Guidelines

Six private Danish foundations have a funding agreement with Universities Denmark. For this call, only the “wet” supplement applies. We invite all participants, Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Sciences to participate. 

The project supplement is only available for the universities, covered by the agreement on project supplements. Foreign universities must use the box “other participants”. 

When research funding is applied for with the participation of partners other than Danish universities, only project participants employed at Danish universities will be eligible for project supplements.

You can find more information in the budget template guidelines. See agreement here and guidelines for project supplement.

All postdoc positions must be advertised. If a named PhD candidate is included in the application, it is assumed the hiring process is already completed.

For Danish applicants

PhD and postdoc salaries must follow state salary levels (1–8), including applicable supplements. Any excess must be covered by the institution. 

Your submitted application must include

• A project proposal of maximum 10 pages (2400 characters per page including spaces), footnotes included, references excluded; figures are not counted as pages.
• Include CVR number if applicable.
• Additional documents: CV of project leader (max 5 pages, and must follow template provided), CV of key collaborators (max 1 page per person, and must follow template provided), a project budget (must follow template provided). 
  Updated 14th of august: for both researchers and practioners (industry, NGO’s, civil society, government actors etc), it is only necessary to follow the “CV guidelines” document in order to create CVs for the application. Thus, the use of the CV template for researchers is not mandatory, as there is already guidelines in place in the document “CV guidelines” for researchers. The Foundation will show flexibility for projects who has already completed their CV’s and apologize for the inconvenience. 

Your 10-page project proposal must include

• A project abstract.
• A description of the research question asked, including project purpose and background and how the research question aligns with the overarching key themes.
• A description of how the project results are relevant to national, regional or international state-of-the-art standards and developments.
• Work packages, including theory, methods, data, and projected outcomes.
• A description of the project organization, leadership, team, and promotion of cross sector collaboration, such as among academic institutions, industry experts and policy makers, advisory/steering boards and international academic cooperation.
• An overview of overlapping or complementary initiatives.
• A project delivery risk assessment.
• A project timeline (e.g., Gantt Chart) covering research phases, dissemination plans, and anchoring strategy throughout and after project completion. A dissemination plan targeting relevant stakeholders and decision-makers, with focus on dissemination of results.

Additionally, applicants must be aware that

• Proposals duplicating previous efforts or lacking innovation will be rejected.
• Proposals must indicate how it is complementing existing initiatives rather than duplicating, such as calls from other funding bodies, public or private.
• Proposals focusing solely on operational costs or with a purely commercial focus will be rejected.
• Proposals fulfilling only legal obligations of authorities will be rejected.
• Proposals must be submitted in English.
• Regional relevance to the North Sea is essential.
• Larger projects are expected to cover more disciplines and address more of the themes listed.
   

Updated 14th of august: for both researchers and practioners (industry, NGO’s, civil society, government actors etc), it is only necessary to follow the “CV guidelines” document in order to create CVs for the application. Thus, the use of the CV template for researchers is not mandatory, as there is already guidelines in place in the document “CV guidelines” for researchers. The Foundation will show flexibility for projects who has already completed their CV’s and apologize for the inconvenience. 

In addition to the application, the following documents must be filled and submitted with the application: