NordForsk Nordic and Baltic Solutions on Food Security 2026: Up to NOK 15 Million per Project From a NOK 115 Million Pot, Closing 2 December 2026

NordForsk Nordic and Baltic Solutions on Food Security 2026: Up to NOK 15 Million per Project From a NOK 115 Million Pot, Closing 2 December 2026

NordForsk published this call on 23 June 2026, and it closes at 13:00 CET (Oslo time) on 2 December 2026. It is one of the larger coordinated research investments in the Nordic-Baltic region this year: a pot of up to NOK 115 million for Nordic partners, separate national allocations for Estonia and Lithuania, and an intention to fund roughly ten consortia. A single project can request up to NOK 15 million from the Nordic pot.

The framing is not agricultural productivity in the abstract. The call is about what happens to food systems when something breaks — a trade restriction, a storm, a cut cable, a fuel shortage, a closed border — and what regional research can do to make the failure shallower and the recovery faster. If your work touches supply chain logistics, storage and cold chains, seafood and land-based value chains, energy and digital dependencies in food processing, or the consumer economics of buying locally produced food, this is a call worth reading carefully rather than skimming.

Key Details

Who Is Funding This, and Why It Matters for Your Budget

This is a joint call rather than a single agency’s programme. NordForsk names the funding partners as the Research Council of Norway, the Agriculture and Food Industry Research Funds (Norway), Formas (Sweden), the Research Council of Finland, the Research Council Faroe Islands, Rannís (Iceland), the Estonian Research Council, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania, the Research Council of Lithuania, and NordForsk itself.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the Nordic side is administered as a joint pot managed by NordForsk, while Estonia and Lithuania finance their own partners nationally at the stated ceilings. That means a Baltic partner’s budget is bounded by their national annex, not by your share of the NOK 15 million. Build the budget with that split in mind from the start, because discovering it late forces an unpleasant rewrite of the work packages.

Second, NordForsk is the single point of contact. Applications are submitted to NordForsk, and NordForsk provides the application guidance — the Research Council of Finland, for example, points applicants straight back to NordForsk rather than running a parallel national process. Do not assume your usual national agency contact will handle queries about this call.

The presence of an agriculture ministry among the funders is a signal in itself. This is not a purely academic exercise; there is policy appetite behind it, and proposals that produce something a ministry or a food system operator can actually use will read better than proposals that end at publication.

The Three Themes, and How to Pick One

Proposals must address food security within at least one of three themes. NordForsk also states an aim to fund projects covering parts of the land-based value chain and parts of the seafood-based value chain, or combinations of the two — worth noting if your instinct is to write a purely terrestrial agriculture proposal.

1. Transnational and transregional preparedness and crisis response in food systems. This theme asks for tools, models and frameworks: risk assessment, scenario planning, crisis management, and coordinated emergency response across food system value chains. The shocks in scope include climate change, natural hazards, geopolitical events and other systemic risks. If you build simulation models, stress-test supply networks, or study how emergency coordination actually works across borders when it is tested, this is your entry point.

2. Resilience and interdependencies of critical infrastructure. Food production and distribution sit on top of transport, storage, energy and digital systems. This theme wants research that identifies vulnerabilities, bottlenecks and cascading risks across agricultural and seafood supply chains, and that explores how those systems could be restructured under future uncertainty. Cascading risk is the operative phrase — the interesting findings here are usually about second-order failures rather than the obvious first-order one.

3. Consumer behaviour and increased use of Nordic and Baltic produced food. Demand matters as much as supply. NordForsk points to consumer attitudes, preferences and barriers around choosing healthy, affordable, and locally or regionally produced food, and names culture, price, availability, information, labelling and policy incentives as factors research may address. Diets built on Nordic and Baltic resources are framed as supporting resilience, sustainability, public health and preparedness at once.

Choose the theme that your evidence base genuinely supports rather than the one that sounds most urgent. A proposal that claims all three and demonstrates none is weaker than a proposal that owns one theme convincingly and gestures honestly at the adjacencies.

Eligibility and Consortium Design

The call is for Nordic or Nordic-Baltic consortia. NordForsk’s general practice for calls of this type is a real common pot in which the project owner — the host institution — must be a research-performing institution, and the specific requirements for applicants and participants are always stipulated in the call text. Read the full call text on the NordForsk funding portal before you finalise your partner list; the exact minimum number of countries and partner types for this call is set there, and this guide does not restate figures that the public call page does not confirm.

What the public call page does state clearly is the expectation on stakeholders: projects are expected to include appropriate stakeholders and end users in the co-development and co-leadership of the project, with engagement across sectors used to identify implementation barriers and to develop strategies and systemic approaches to overcome them.

Read “co-leadership” literally. A letter of support from a food logistics firm is not co-leadership. A named partner with a work package, a budget line, and decision rights over the research questions is. Reviewers on preparedness calls are practised at spotting stakeholders who were recruited in the last fortnight before submission, and the tell is usually that the stakeholder appears in the impact section and nowhere else.

Good candidates for that role in this call are obvious once you look: national food agencies and civil preparedness authorities, port and cold-storage operators, fisheries and aquaculture producer organisations, agricultural cooperatives, grocery wholesalers, municipal emergency planners, and consumer organisations. Approach them now, not in November.

Money, Scope, and Matching the Two

A ceiling of NOK 15 million per project against a pot of NOK 115 million and roughly ten expected awards tells you something useful: the average award will be meaningfully below the ceiling. Requesting the maximum is not automatically wrong, but it does mean your work plan has to justify being one of the largest projects funded, and it narrows how many other proposals can be funded alongside yours. A well-argued mid-sized budget with a tight consortium is often a stronger competitive position than a maximum request stretched across too many partners.

Note also that NordForsk does not publish a per-partner breakdown of the Nordic pot on the call page. That is deliberate — the split is yours to propose and defend. Budgets that allocate a token sum to a partner purely to add a country flag tend to be visible. So do budgets where the coordinating institution absorbs most of the funding and the other partners are effectively subcontractors.

Timeline and What to Do Between Now and December

• 23 June 2026 — call published.
• 19 August 2026, 10:00 CEST — NordForsk hosts an information webinar for researchers and stakeholders interested in the call. Sign-up is via the call page.
• 2 November 2026 — deadline to complete the contact list form. This adds you to a shared list of interested researchers and shares your details with others; it is the intended route for finding partners you do not already know.
• 2 December 2026, 13:00 CET — application deadline.

Note that the contact list closes a month before the application deadline. If you are missing a country or a discipline in your consortium, treat early November as your real deadline for that problem, not December.

The question-and-answer channel is [email protected]. NordForsk asks that questions be phrased in general terms, because both question and answer are published and the Q&A section is updated continuously. Check the published Q&A before writing in — on calls like this, the ambiguity you have spotted has usually been spotted already, and the published answer is authoritative in a way that a hallway conversation is not.

How Proposals Are Assessed

For calls run under NordForsk, a committee is appointed for each call consisting of a chairperson and a member from each of the funding partners. That committee draws up the funding recommendation, and it does so on three inputs: international expert assessments, the Nordic added value of the projects, and a strategic assessment of which projects best contribute to the call objectives. The NordForsk Board makes the final decision.

The middle input is the one applicants most often underweight. Nordic added value is not a rhetorical flourish to be inserted in the last paragraph — it is a distinct assessment dimension. A project that could have been done just as well inside one country, with international partners bolted on, scores badly on it no matter how strong the science is. Ask yourself plainly: what does this project produce that a purely national project could not? For this call, credible answers usually involve cross-border data or infrastructure, comparative policy settings, shared value chains, or coordination problems that only appear at the regional scale.

The third input — strategic contribution to the call objectives — rewards proposals that engage with the stated framing. NordForsk explicitly cites the Karlstad Declaration of 19 June 2024, which underscores joint Nordic efforts on food preparedness and resilience through coordinated policy, planning and research, and NATO’s Civil Emergency Planning Committee, which lists secure and sustainable access to food and water among its baseline requirements for member states. You do not have to write a security studies proposal, but a proposal that shows it understands why this call exists in 2026 reads differently from one that could have been submitted to any food systems programme in any year.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Treating the deadline as the start of consortium-building. Multi-country consortia with non-academic co-leads take months to assemble. The 2 November contact list cut-off exists because NordForsk knows this.

Writing a supply-side proposal for a systems call. The call’s own background text emphasises that food security is influenced not only by production capacity but by logistics, storage capacity, cross-border cooperation, and optimal use of regional resources across seafood, meat and plant-based food. A proposal about yield improvement alone misses the framing.

Ignoring the seafood dimension. The stated aim covers land-based and seafood-based value chains, or combined projects. Nordic food security without fisheries and aquaculture is an incomplete picture, and consortia that can genuinely speak to both have an angle many competitors will not.

Budgeting the Baltic partners out of the Nordic pot. Estonian and Lithuanian partners are financed nationally at their own ceilings. Get this structure right at the outline stage.

Missing the CET deadline by a time zone. The deadline is 13:00 CET, Oslo time — a midday cut-off, not midnight. Submitting from a different time zone on the assumption of an end-of-day deadline is an avoidable way to lose months of work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this call open now? Yes. It was published on 23 June 2026 and closes on 2 December 2026 at 13:00 CET.

How many projects will be funded? NordForsk states an aim of approximately ten Nordic or Nordic-Baltic research projects.

Can a single partner request the full NOK 115 million? No. The stated maximum that may be sought for Nordic partners in a single project is NOK 15 million; NOK 115 million is the total available across the call.

Do Estonian and Lithuanian partners draw on the same money? No. Estonia funds its partners up to EUR 300,000 and Lithuania up to EUR 420,000, through their own national funding organisations. Their national annexes govern those budgets.

How long can a project run? The public call page does not state a duration. Check the full call text on the NordForsk funding portal, which is linked from the call page, and do not assume a duration when drafting the work plan.

What are the exact consortium composition requirements? These are set in the full call text rather than on the summary page. NordForsk’s general rule for its calls is that the project owner must be a research-performing institution, with participant requirements stipulated per call.

Where do I apply? Through the NordForsk funding portal, reachable via the “Read the full call text and apply” link on the official call page. NordForsk is also responsible for application guidance.

Can I ask questions privately? The Q&A email is [email protected], but NordForsk publishes both questions and answers, so phrase queries in general terms.

Preparing a Competitive Application

Start from the failure mode, not the method. The strongest proposals to preparedness calls typically open with a specific, concrete disruption that the region has plausibly faced or will face — a closed strait, a fuel price shock, a cold-chain outage during a heatwave, a cyber incident at a distribution hub — and then work backwards to the research needed to reduce its consequences. That structure makes the relevance argument self-evident and gives the stakeholder partners something real to co-own.

Be specific about evidence. Preparedness research is easy to write vaguely and hard to write well, because the interesting data — inventory levels, routing, contractual dependencies, incident logs — is often commercially sensitive. If you have secured access to that data, say so explicitly and early; it is a genuine differentiator. If you have not, explain how you will get it, because reviewers will otherwise assume you will not.

Plan the policy pathway. The funder list includes an agriculture ministry and multiple national research councils with applied mandates. Describe who will act on your findings, in what form they need them, and when. A mid-term deliverable aimed at a real planning cycle is worth more than a final report aimed at nobody in particular.

Finally, attend the webinar on 19 August 2026 and read the published Q&A as it accumulates. On joint calls with multiple national annexes, most of the costly errors are administrative rather than scientific, and both channels exist precisely to prevent them.

Official Links

• Call page and application route: Call for proposals: Nordic and Baltic solutions on food security
• Pre-announcement with funder list and contacts: NordForsk pre-announcement
• Information webinar, 19 August 2026: Webinar about the call
• How NordForsk runs calls and assesses proposals: Call and funding process
• Finnish applicants’ summary: Research Council of Finland call page
• Questions: [email protected]