2027 RISK Award — Homes at Risk: Up to €100,000 From the Munich Re Foundation and UNDRR for NGO Projects Building Climate Resilience in Informal Urban Settlements

2027 RISK Award — Homes at Risk: Up to €100,000 From the Munich Re Foundation and UNDRR for NGO Projects Building Climate Resilience in Informal Urban Settlements

Climate finance has a geography problem. Money flows toward projects that can be measured with formal planning instruments — municipal drainage upgrades, national early warning systems, grid-scale infrastructure. Informal settlements sit outside almost all of those instruments. They are frequently absent from cadastral records, underrepresented in hazard maps, and excluded from investment mechanisms that assume secure land tenure and a registered address. The Munich Re Foundation’s framing of this year’s RISK Award topic is blunt about the result: only a small share of global climate finance reaches the urban poor, and informal urban settlements remain largely overlooked in urban disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation planning.

The 2027 RISK Award is a deliberate correction. Its topic is “Homes at risk: Climate resilience for informal settlements,” and it offers up to €100,000 to one operational project that reduces climate-related disaster risk at the household and neighbourhood level in exactly these places. The award has run since 2012, is granted every two years, and is jointly organised by the Munich Re Foundation and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).

Phase I of the application closes on 31 July 2026 at 12:00 CET. That is a short runway from today, but Phase I is deliberately light — a completed online form plus one concept template — so an organisation with an existing, well-defined project can still make it.

Key details at a glance

What the award actually funds

The €100,000 is not a personal prize or an unrestricted institutional gift. The guidelines are explicit: the prize has to be used for the implementation of the proposed project, and each awardee signs an individual funding agreement tailored to the specific project situation and needs.

That framing matters for how you scope your proposal. The Munich Re Foundation is buying delivery, not analysis. The content rules state plainly that the proposed project must include an implementation part — action — and that a proposal based solely on research is not sufficient. If your organisation’s strength is producing risk assessments, vulnerability studies, or participatory mapping, the assessment work needs to sit inside a project that visibly changes something on the ground: retrofitted roofs, cooled public spaces, functioning community flood alerts, drainage that gets maintained, households that have somewhere to go when a storm arrives.

The risks addressed must relate to climate change and natural hazards. Risks arising solely from social turmoil, war, chemical disasters, or political crises fall outside scope. This is a real constraint for organisations working in complex emergencies — a project protecting displaced people from monsoon flooding is in scope; a project addressing displacement itself is not.

The organisers also state a preference rather than a rule: they appreciate people-centred approaches and community-based initiatives. Given that the topic explicitly targets settlements where residents already manage escalating risk on their own through incremental household and neighbourhood measures, a proposal that treats residents as beneficiaries rather than as the people doing the work is unlikely to read well.

Who is eligible

Eligibility is defined tightly and is worth checking before you invest time:

• Non-profit organisations only. Business development cannot be supported, and the project itself must be non-profit.
• Institutions, not individuals. The RISK Award is given to institutions or organisations. Individual applicants cannot be considered.
• Local presence required. Applicants may be local entities, or international organisations that have a regional or local office in the project region.
• Country classification. The project must be based in a middle-income or low-income country according to World Bank classification. Note that this is about where the project is based, not where the applicant is headquartered.
• Consortia are welcome, with a caveat. Multi-stakeholder initiatives are explicitly welcomed, but the application requires a clearly designated focal-point organisation. Decide who that is early — it determines who signs the funding agreement.

The two-phase application process

Phase I (1 June – 31 July 2026, 12:00 CET) is open to all legitimate organisations. You register in the online system, complete the online form in full, then download the concept template — a Word form that becomes available once you have registered as an applicant — complete it fully, and upload it back as a PDF. The application must be in English. All relevant information must be in the system by the deadline; late submissions and late additions cannot be considered.

Applicants are informed no later than two months after the end of Phase I, which places notifications by the end of September 2026. The best submissions receive an invitation to Phase II. Organisations not selected in Phase I cannot be considered further in this cycle.

Phase II (1 October – 30 November 2026, 12:00 CET) is by invitation only. It requires a completed online form plus four Word documents, each fully completed and uploaded as PDFs:

1. Detailed Description
2. Detailed Milestone Plan
3. Detailed Impact Framework
4. Detailed Budget

These templates appear in the application portal only for organisations invited forward. Review runs from 1 December 2026 to 31 March 2027, with individual notification in April 2027 and final status communicated no later than May 2027. The organisers state they cannot provide interim updates, so plan on a long silence between December and April.

Documents may only be submitted through the online application system using the provided templates. Applications sent by post, email, or other channels will not be considered.

The five evaluation indicators — and how to write to them

Phase II proposals are evaluated against five named indicators, and the guidelines advise applicants to highlight how the project contributes to each and to structure the proposal text accordingly:

1. Potential for impact. How much measurable risk reduction, for how many people, in what timeframe.
2. Equity. Who inside the settlement benefits — and who is usually missed. Tenants versus owners, women-headed households, older residents in upper-floor heat traps, people without documents.
3. Scalability. Whether the approach can move beyond one neighbourhood without a proportional increase in cost or a founder-dependent delivery model.
4. Viability and sustainability. What survives after the funding ends — maintained assets, trained committees, a municipal agreement, a revenue mechanism.
5. Institutional capacity. Whether your organisation can actually deliver and account for the money.

Even though these are formally Phase II criteria, the Phase I concept is what determines whether you ever see Phase II. Reviewers reading a short concept are effectively looking for early evidence on the same five dimensions. Naming them implicitly — a sentence on who is reached, a sentence on what persists, a sentence on your delivery track record — costs little space and signals that you have read the guidelines.

Budget rules that catch applicants out

The budget section contains several specific constraints that are easy to get wrong:

• Funding is limited to €100,000, the value of the award.
• The proposed project budget should not be less than €50,000. A very small project will not fit.
• The overall project budget — combining your own contribution, external funding, and the RISK Award — must not exceed €1,000,000. Above that, the organisers judge the award’s contribution too small to be meaningful.
• If your total budget exceeds the award, you must state the overall project volume and where the remaining financial resources will come from.
• The RISK Award contribution must have a visible impact within the project. Where the award funds only part of a larger effort, it must be clear what specifically the award money buys.
• The proposal should include milestone planning and a rough budget plan explaining how the funding will be used.
• Project timeline must be between 12 months and a maximum of 2 years.

The most common structural failure here is co-funding vagueness. “The remaining €400,000 will be raised from institutional donors” is weaker than naming secured and pipeline sources with amounts and status. The second most common is burying the award’s role inside a large budget line so a reviewer cannot see what €100,000 actually delivers. Carve out a discrete, attributable workstream.

Who decides

The final decision rests with a jury of internationally recognised disaster risk reduction experts, described by the organisers as balanced across geographies and gender and drawn from policy, science, and practice. Members have included Paola Albrito, UNDRR Director since October 2022 and a UN system veteran on Sendai Framework implementation; Renate Bleich, chair of the Munich Re Foundation; Michael Havbro Faber, professor at the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University and previously a tenured professor at ETH Zurich; and Nuraini Rahma Hanifa of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), working with the Research Center for Geological Disaster.

The practical implication: this is not a panel that needs disaster risk reduction explained to it, and it will notice unsupported impact claims. But it is also a mixed panel of scientists and practitioners, so a proposal written purely in academic register or purely in advocacy register will lose part of the room.

What past winners tell you about fit

The award’s history is a useful calibration tool. Recent and earlier winners include:

• 2025 — ChildFund Bolivia, emergency preparedness in indigenous schools
• 2023 — The Association for Water and Rural Development (AWARD), a holistic early warning system for climate-induced water insecurity in the transboundary Inkomati River Basin, South Africa
• 2021 — “Strong Roots, Strong Women”
• 2019 — Resilient floating homes in Bangladesh
• 2017 — The EpiNurse project in Nepal
• 2015 — Community self-assessment in India
• 2014 — Peñaflor inclusive safe community: resilience for all, Chile
• 2012 — Making Beira resilient to floods and cyclones, Mozambique

The pattern is consistent: concrete, place-based, community-anchored, and legible in a single sentence. Floating homes. Nurses doing epidemiological surveillance. Schools that know what to do. None of these are large-scale infrastructure, and none are pure knowledge products.

The Foundation also publishes “Best Project Proposals” compilations for past cycles, including 2025 (“Children and youths as agents of change for DRR”), 2023 (“Climate resilience and early warning”), and 2021 (“Eco- and nature-based solutions for disaster risk reduction”). Reading the compilation for a recent cycle is probably the highest-value hour you can spend before writing, because it shows you the standard of shortlisted work rather than only the single winner.

Why this topic, this cycle

The framing document sets out the reasoning. Urban populations are growing fastest in low- and middle-income countries, and according to UN-Habitat and World Bank estimates more than one billion people currently live in informal or semi-formal urban settlements — a figure expected to rise significantly. These neighbourhoods are often on floodplains, steep slopes, or inside dense urban heat islands, with inadequate housing, weak infrastructure, limited access to basic services, and insecure land tenure. Climate hazards translate quickly into health, safety, and livelihood impacts: recurrent flood losses, heat-related illness, water contamination.

The 2027 topic is aligned with the UNDRR International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction 2026 and its theme, “Resilience starts at home.” The award as a whole is anchored in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the organisers position projects in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

If you are choosing which of your projects to submit, the alignment signal is clear: household-to-community scale, immediate lived hazards (extreme heat, flooding, storms), and a settlement type that formal planning has skipped.

Preparing a strong Phase I concept in a short window

With days rather than weeks remaining, the realistic play is to submit an existing project rather than design a new one. A workable sequence:

1. Register in the online system today. The concept template only becomes available after registration, and you cannot write to a template you have not seen.
2. Confirm the country classification. Check the World Bank income classification for the project country before anything else. This is a hard gate.
3. Name the hazard and the settlement. Reviewers should know within two sentences which neighbourhood, which hazard, and how many people.
4. Show the action. State what will physically or operationally change, and for whom.
5. Sketch the budget honestly. Total volume, RISK Award share, other sources with status, and what the €100,000 specifically buys.
6. Designate the focal point. If you are working in a consortium, settle this before submission, not after.
7. Submit early. The deadline is 12:00 CET, not end of day, and late additions are not accepted.

Common mistakes

• Submitting a research project. The single clearest disqualifier in the guidelines.
• Treating the deadline as midnight. It is 12:00 CET on 31 July 2026.
• Applying as an individual. The award goes to institutions only.
• Applying from outside the project region without a local office. International organisations need a regional or local presence where the project runs.
• Proposing a project under €50,000 or a total volume over €1,000,000. Both fall outside the stated budget range.
• Proposing a project longer than two years. The maximum duration is firm.
• Submitting outside the online system. Post and email submissions are not considered.
• Addressing conflict or political crisis risk. Outside scope unless the hazard is climate or natural.

Frequently asked questions

Is the RISK Award annual? No. It is granted every two years. Missing this cycle means waiting for the next topic announcement rather than reapplying next year.

Can I apply if I am an individual researcher or community leader? No. The award is given to institutions or organisations.

Does my organisation have to be headquartered in a low- or middle-income country? Not necessarily. The project must be based in one, and an international applicant must have a regional or local office in the project region.

Can I submit in a language other than English? No. The form and concept must be completed in English.

Will I get feedback if I am not selected in Phase I? The guidelines say applicants are informed no later than two months after Phase I closes, and that unselected applicants cannot be considered further. Detailed feedback is not promised, and the organisers state they cannot provide interim updates during Phase II review.

Can the award fund part of a larger programme? Yes, provided the total project volume stays at or below €1,000,000 and it is visible what the RISK Award contribution specifically funds.

When would funding actually arrive? Notification is in April 2027, with the ceremony provisionally in May or June 2027, and each awardee concludes an individual funding agreement. Plan your project start accordingly rather than assuming money in early 2027.

Official links and next steps

The call for applications, dates, and registration link sit on the Munich Re Foundation’s 2027 RISK Award call page: munichre-foundation.org — 2027 RISK Award call for applications. The full application guidelines, including eligibility, budget rules, and the five Phase II evaluation indicators, are on the RISK Award application guidelines page, and the jury page lists the panel making the final decision. Background on the award, past winners, and the “Best Project Proposals” publications is on the main RISK Award page.

If your organisation runs implementation work on heat, flooding, or storm risk inside an informal or semi-formal urban settlement in a low- or middle-income country, this is a well-matched call with an unusually light first stage. The heavy lift — detailed description, milestone plan, impact framework, and budget — only arrives if you are invited to Phase II in October. Register, read the concept template, and get your submission in before noon Central European Time on 31 July.