Envirolink Update - 30 June 2025
MBIE has now officially confirmed that Envirolink will continue to be funded from 1 July 2025. There will be a Tool Proposal round closing early October. See the Tool application link for the process.
The Winter 2025 Newsletter is available. V3 should have removed linkage errors.
New advice grant reports are available on this website as is a new tool "R18-2 DNA reference sequences for freshwater insects and marine fishes".
There is also a new page hosting reports produced by the Emergency Weather Recovery Advice Fund.
The latest Coastal SIG research strategy is available on the Regional Council Science Strategy link.
New "Good News Stories" are available on this page.
Six very good Tool grant applications were submitted in October and have been reviewed by the Tool Committee. Two have been gone to full proposal and external review.
There is a new advice grant application template now available. This was updated on the 4th October. The main difference is that all there is only one form to cover all three classes of advice grants.
Last year's (2024) Tool Round applications closed in October 2024 and proposals were reviewed by the Tool Committee in October and recommendations were reviewed by the Governance Committee in mid-November. Recommendations for full proposal development were sent to MBIE in early December and these have now been completed and externally reviewed. Contracts are expected to be issued for the new tool projects on 1 July 2025.
A complete list of Tools and Tool Projects is available here and also on the Tool page.
In 2019 MBIE published an independent review of Envirolink. The report is available at:
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/envirolink-evaluation-report-2019.pdf
As a result of the review the maximum funding for all advice grant categories was doubled, but the total amount of funds available remained the same. MBIE is currently working with the Envirolink Coordinator to reduce administration costs to streamline the advice grant process.
New Stories
"New stories", short snippets on some of the Envirolink projects can be found on the News & Events page. New stories will be added as they are developed.
New reports and tools are available on this website (under Reports).
Regional Council Revised RS&T Strategy 2020
The Regional Council RS&T Strategy (third version released in June 2016) as updated in 2020. Plans are underway for the Science Advisory Group to update the strategy in late 2025. The 2020 strategy takes both a top-down and a bottom-up approach as it contains input from 9 Special Interest Group strategies. Previous versions of the strategy have been invaluable in providing direction to the MBIE contestable funding round that closed mid March. It has also been used to provide input to the DoC/MfE Conservation and Environment Science Roadmap, to Biosecurity 2025, and to other MPI initiatives. In 2022 it was used to feed into the MfE-led Environment and Climate Science Research strategy.
(Go to Strategy)
Last updated 25 June 2025.