The UK Overseas Territories Fund has achieved significant success and impact. Sufina Ahmad from John Ellerman Foundation, and Sophia Cooke from the Environmental Funders Network, discuss the findings of their recent report and urge other funders to join the UKOTs Fund.
The UK Overseas Territories Fund has achieved significant success and impact. Sufina Ahmad, Director of John Ellerman Foundation, and Sophia Cooke, Environment Sector Programme Lead from the Environmental Funders Network, discuss the findings of their recent report and urge other funders to join the UK Overseas Territories Fund.
Why bother with the UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs)?
Like many of you, we’re sure you will have spent time wondering when is the work of independent philanthropic institutions and individuals at its very best?
We’d say it’s when we work together to step in and step up. When we come together to shine a light on something not just deserving of our attention but quite frankly demanding of it. The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) present an example of exactly this.
The UKOTs are arguably the UK’s most important environmental treasures. Scattered across the globe, they are home to every major habitat type on earth, including rainforest, tundra, desert, coral reef, and icefield. These areas are crucibles of evolution, housing at least 94% of the UK’s unique wildlife species and comprising the fifth-largest marine estate on the planet. Nature exists in the UKOTs at an unimaginably vast scale. If you care about our planet and are seeking to respond to the nature and climate crises, then the UKOTs matter.
Despite their ecological significance, the UKOTs are often overlooked in global conservation efforts. International funders may consider them the responsibility of UK funders, and UK funders might not realise they can support work in the UKOTs. Their small populations and geographic isolation make it difficult for local organisations, run by passionate environmental experts, to access the resources needed to protect these ecosystems. Threats from climate change, invasive species, and habitat degradation are growing, yet the UKOTs still receive just 0.03% of UK philanthropic funding.
Why invest in the UKOTs Fund?
In 2021, after nearly ten years of supporting environmental work in the UKOTs, John Ellerman Foundation decided to set up the UK Overseas Territories Fund (UKOTs Fund) is a way of addressing this stark funding gap.
The UKOTs Fund is a funder collaboration that offers flexibility to the contributing funders in terms of where they may wish to focus their funding and how much they may wish to contribute. John Ellerman Foundation assumes main responsibility for assessing and managing the grants made, but ensures accountability to fellow funders on how the funds are being used. We have run two round of the UKOTs Fund in 2021 and 2022 and are now fundraising for future rounds. To date, UKOTs Fund has distributed over £1.8 million, and supported work in ten of the UKOTs.
The UKOTs Fund foremost offers financial support. But we know that the UKOTs offer unparalleled opportunities to create lasting and positive change. The UKOTs Fund has supported activities like:
- Practical conservation: Funding projects that directly protect and restore habitats and species, such as safeguarding seabird nesting sites or restoring degraded wetlands
- Capacity building: Strengthening local NGOs to ensure sustained conservation efforts beyond the life of individual projects
- Policy and advocacy: Facilitating the creation of robust legal frameworks to protect biodiversity
- Land acquisition: Purchasing land with high conservation value to ensure its permanent protection, rather than for financial or speculative purposes.
For any funder looking to help protect globally significant ecosystems and at-risk species, joining the contributor base for the UKOTs Fund is an obvious, strategic and efficient choice
The UKOTs Fund is impactful and successful
It feels strange to write so definitively that the UKOTs Fund is impactful and successful. But it is. Having worked in and alongside charitable giving for a while now, this isn’t something we say lightly. A review by Environmental Funders Network and John Ellerman Foundation – The UK Overseas Territories Fund: An unparalleled opportunity for environmental philanthropy – highlighted its significant achievements, with findings including:
- The Fund has catalysed urgent conservation activities such as invasive species eradication, habitat restoration and the protection of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems
- Specific achievements include the creation of coral biobanks in the Turks and Caicos Islands, the creation and expansion of national parks in the Falkland Islands and Anguilla, and ground breaking research on whale sharks in St Helena
- Funding has also bolstered the capacity of local environmental organisations, enabling them to deliver more impactful and sustained conservation efforts, and leverage further funding
- Grant-holders highlighted the ease of interacting with the UKOTs Fund and its flexibility, particularly in providing much-needed core cost funding, rarely available from other sources
- The cost-to-impact ratio shown by the UKOTs Fund has also demonstrated the potential for relatively modest investments to yield substantial conservation benefits in these biodiversity-rich regions. As such, it provides a unique opportunity for funders at all scales to make a meaningful difference. The due diligence work undertaken by John Ellerman Foundation also means little research time is needed on behalf of contributing funders. For any funder looking to help protect globally significant ecosystems and at-risk species, joining the contributor base for the UKOTs Fund is therefore an obvious, strategic and efficient choice.
The time is now
If you are at the very beginning or well into your journey of responding to the nature and climate crises, then the UKOTs Fund is for you. It has supported expert and non expert environmental funders to come together and support the courageous and vital work happening across the UKOTs. There is still so much more to do and future funding rounds would not only sustain the momentum of current projects, and allow scaling of efforts, but would also provide opportunities for other initiatives across the UKOTs.
If the UKOTs Fund were to evolve into a long-term initiative, its potential impact would be unparalleled.
Over the past year, the Environmental Funders Network has run a series of learning events for funders exploring the UKOTs.
Further information is available on the UKOTs sections of John Ellerman Foundation and Environmental Funders Network. Together, they produced the report UK Overseas Territories Fund: An unparalleled opportunity for environmental philanthropy.
The UK Overseas Territories: An unparalleled opportunity for global conservation impact and accompanying video was produced by Jonathan Hall (Conservation International/RSPB) during a secondment to the Environmental Funders Network.
This blog is adapted from the Environmental Funders Network A call to action: Why funders should join the UK Overseas Territories Fund
Interested in finding out more and joining the UKOTs Fund?
John Ellerman Foundation are seeking funders to join the UKOTs Fund. For more information and to discuss further, contact Sufina Ahmad
