2026 UKRI/NERC Ocean Carbon Modeling Grant: Historical Guide to the Multiple Model Assessment Call

The official UKRI opportunity page now labels this funding opportunity Closed. It was a one-cycle 2026 call from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), with support from NASA, for a UK-US project on the biological processes that affect ocean carbon storage in contrasting global models. The published closing date was 14 July 2026 at 4:00pm UK time. The official page does not announce a successor round or a new application window, so this page is a historical reference rather than an open listing.

The call remains useful to researchers planning related work because it gives a clear example of how NERC and NASA framed a model-development project around the ocean biological carbon pump. It also records the practical requirements that applied to the 2026 cycle: who could lead, what the science needed to cover, how the UK and US contributions were handled, and which stages were required in the UKRI Funding Service.

At a glance: the 2026 call

The £625,000 figure was the maximum full economic cost of the UK component, not a guaranteed award and not a personal prize. NERC stated that it would fund 80% of the FEC. The official page also stated that the maximum cost of the US component, across this opportunity and the linked “Biological influence on ocean carbon: novel modelling approaches” opportunity, could be up to $1 million, subject to funding availability. US applicants were directed to NASA for details about eligible costs and support.

What the program was designed to fund

The call supported the BIO-Carbon research programme and NASA’s EXPORTS programme. Its central purpose was to incorporate new representations of key biological processes regulating ocean carbon storage into contrasting global models. The scientific problem is that marine organisms affect how carbon is taken up, transformed, exported from the surface ocean, and retained at depth, while global coupled ocean-atmosphere models do not yet represent all of those effects consistently.

The official scope identified several connected questions:

• How marine life affects the ability of seawater to continue taking up carbon dioxide, and how that may change.
• How the rate at which marine life converts dissolved carbon dioxide into organic carbon may change.
• How upper-ocean ecosystem characteristics determine the vertical transfer of organic matter from the well-lit surface ocean.
• What controls the efficiency of that transfer below the well-lit surface ocean.
• How future changes in marine ecosystem respiration may affect ocean carbon storage.
• How new knowledge can reduce uncertainty in present and future estimates of the export and fate of net primary production.

This was therefore more specific than a general ocean-climate modeling grant. Applicants were expected to connect biological process understanding to model parameterisations, global predictions, and uncertainty. The official scope called for a diverse range of global models so that the effect of biologically driven changes in ocean carbon storage could be assessed robustly through 2100.

Projects had to address processes that were globally relevant, occurred in the open-ocean water column, lay beyond the continental shelf break, and were in areas where the seafloor was typically deeper than 1,000 metres. A project focused only on coastal waters, shelf seas, a local ecosystem, or an isolated observational campaign would have needed a strong explanation of how it met the call’s global open-ocean requirements.

The call expected applicants to build on information from previous BIO-Carbon opportunities, the EXPORTS programme, and relevant international projects. The UKRI page directed researchers to the BIO-Carbon webpage for datasets and contacts, and to NASA’s SeaBASS website for EXPORTS data. A credible proposal would therefore have needed to show how its model development and evaluation would use existing observations and programme outputs rather than treating the new project as a stand-alone modeling exercise.

Eligibility in the closed cycle

The project lead and UK researchers had to be based at a UK research organisation eligible to apply for UKRI funding. The call said that individuals at any career stage could apply, subject to the normal eligibility rules and the opportunity-specific restrictions.

Project leads based outside the UK were not permitted. Project co-leads could be based in the UK or the US. A US project co-lead had to be affiliated with a US institution at the time of application submission and had to be entered in the core team as Project co-lead (International). US applicants were told to contact Laura Lorenzoni at NASA for further details about the NASA side of the collaboration.

Other international collaborators, including UK partners who were not based at approved organisations, had to be included as project partners. The official page also explained that project partners were not expected to fund their own involvement through the UK application; only minor incidental expenses, such as necessary travel, could be funded for partners under the stated restriction.

There was a demand-management rule on the number of applications: a person could be involved in no more than two applications submitted to this opportunity, and only one of those could list that person as project lead. A full application was also ineligible if the team had not submitted the required NoI by its deadline.

Funding and project design constraints

The UK part of a proposal could request up to £625,000 FEC, with NERC funding 80% of that FEC. The award duration was a maximum of 24 months, and successful projects had to start in January 2027. The schedule mattered because the call was asking for model implementation, cross-model experiments, evaluation, and synthesis within a defined two-year award.

The official page said that UKRI would fund facilities costs, subject to the normal access and costing procedures. Applicants needing a UKRI facility had to discuss the proposed work with that facility in advance, obtain confirmation that the service could be provided within the project timeframe, and include the facility cost within the funding limits. Technical assessments were not to be submitted with the application, but applicants had to confirm that they had received them. HPC, ship time, marine equipment, and large research facilities at Harwell had their own access and costing policies.

Several costs were explicitly excluded. UKRI would not fund PhD studentship costs. Equipment costing £25,000 or more was not eligible as a request; smaller equipment items were to be requested under consumables and other directly incurred costs. US applicants were directed to NASA for their own eligible-cost guidance.

For a UK-US application, the UK team had to include a contingency plan explaining how the work would change if NASA could not fund the US involvement. NERC strongly encouraged plans that retained in-kind contributions from US researchers where appropriate. If the work did not need US researchers because it was outside EXPORTS scope, the application had to state and justify that decision clearly.

How applications had to be submitted

The 2026 process had two mandatory stages.

Stage one: notification of intent

Applicants first had to complete the BIO Carbon: Biological Influence on Ocean Carbon: Multiple Model Assessments notification-of-intent form by 8 May 2026 at 4:00pm UK time. The official page was explicit that a full application submitted without a prior NoI by the stated deadline would be rejected.

The NoI requested the proposed team and a summary of the research project. It was used to inform assessment-panel planning and was not assessed as a final proposal. UKRI said that additional partners and co-leads could be added later and that the application could change substantially while the full proposal was prepared. Applicants received an automated email acknowledgement after submitting the form, and feedback was not normally provided unless UKRI had concerns about fit with the opportunity’s scope.

Stage two: full application

The full application had to reach NERC by 14 July 2026 at 4:00pm UK time. The application was run on the new UKRI Funding Service, not Je-S. The project lead was responsible for completing the application, while the lead research organisation was the only organisation allowed to submit it to UKRI.

The official submission sequence was:

1. Select “Start application” on the Funding Finder page.
2. Confirm that you are the project lead.
3. Sign in or create a Funding Service account, select the organisation, verify the email address, and set a password.
4. Answer the questions in the Funding Service, saving work between sessions or preparing responses offline for later transfer.
5. Check the completed application in read-only view before sending it to the research office.
6. Send it to the research office for institutional and finance checks.
7. Have the research office submit the checked application to UKRI.

The deadline was a receipt deadline. UKRI warned that applicants needed to allow time for internal research-office and finance checks, and that a submitted application could not later be changed or amended. The Funding Service also allowed relevant elements of answers to be demonstrated visually, but images needed captions, had to meet the file-size rules, and could not be used as a substitute for paragraphs or tables.

Application sections and required information

The Funding Service asked for a set of structured responses rather than a single free-form grant document. The official page listed these sections and limits:

• Summary: up to 550 words, written in plain English and suitable for identifying reviewers.
• Vision: up to 1,000 words explaining the objective, importance, new knowledge, timeliness, and potential impact.
• Approach: up to 2,500 words explaining the method, feasibility, risks, prior work, outputs, and the full UK and US activity.
• Applicant and team capability to deliver: up to 1,650 words, including the R4RI modules and optional additions.
• Ethics and responsible research and innovation: up to 500 words.
• Resources and cost justification: up to 2,000 words, focused on costly or unusual resources and excluding NASA team costs.
• Data management and sharing: up to 500 words, covering the relevant NERC data centre, data volume, access, and compliance with NERC policy.
• Facilities: up to 250 words where a UKRI facility was needed.
• Trusted Research and Innovation: up to 100 words where relevant.
• International collaboration: up to 1,500 words for NASA-funded collaboration, including the US lead applicant, institution, role, contact details, and requested NASA budget.

The US lead applicant had to be listed as a project co-lead (international) in the core team with zero cost in the UK resources section. NASA-funded activity belonged in the international-collaboration section, not the UK project-partner section. The UKRI page also required the US contribution to be described in the vision, approach, and team-capability responses.

What a strong proposal would have needed to show

Although the 2026 submission window is closed, the published scope makes the assessment logic clear. A persuasive proposal would have needed a defined biological process or small group of processes, a reason those processes matter globally, and a plan to implement and test them across genuinely contrasting models. “Multiple models” had to be more than running the same analysis twice; the comparison needed to reveal how model structure, ecosystem representation, or parameterisation affected projected carbon storage.

The evaluation plan would have been central. Applicants could have selected diagnostics such as export production, vertical remineralisation profiles, carbon sequestration timescales, air-sea carbon dioxide flux, oxygen utilisation, or nutrient tracer distributions, but they needed to explain what each diagnostic would test and which observations or programme datasets would provide the comparison. The official scope’s emphasis on robust predictions through 2100 also called for a clear treatment of uncertainty, not only a single preferred simulation.

The team plan needed to connect model development, experiment coordination, data management, and synthesis. For a UK-US project, the approach had to identify the US collaborators and their affiliations and explain how the NASA-supported work fitted the UK work. The contingency plan for loss of NASA funding was a formal requirement, so international participation could not be left as an informal promise.

The two-year maximum duration made sequencing important. A credible plan would have started with baselines and shared experiment definitions, moved to implementation and testing, then completed cross-model comparisons and synthesis within the award. It also needed to explain how code, parameterisations, datasets, and evaluation outputs would be documented and shared under the relevant data policies.

Historical application checklist

For researchers using this page to plan a related future call, the 2026 checklist is a useful record of the process but is not a current invitation to apply:

• Verify that the lead organisation is eligible for UKRI funding and that the project lead is UK-based.
• Confirm the scientific fit with globally relevant open-ocean processes beyond the continental shelf break and generally deeper than 1,000 metres.
• Define the contrasting global models, biological processes, common experiment protocol, diagnostics, observations, and uncertainty analysis.
• Confirm any US co-lead’s US institutional affiliation and agree how NASA-funded activity would be represented.
• Prepare the NoI before drafting the full application; missing it made the full application ineligible for this cycle.
• Build the FEC budget with the 80% NERC contribution, excluded-cost rules, facilities procedures, and the NASA contingency plan in view.
• Prepare the Funding Service sections and leave time for research-office submission.
• Check the official UKRI page for a new opportunity before relying on any deadline or rule from this historical cycle.

Official source and current status

The official source is the UKRI funding opportunity page. It identifies NERC as the funder and NASA as the co-funder, records the 2026 opening and closing dates, and provides the eligibility, funding, scope, and application instructions summarized here.

As of this review, the page is closed and does not announce a next round. Do not use the 2026 deadline to plan a new submission. Check UKRI and NERC directly for any future opportunity or successor call.