It is delivered by Enterprise Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland and InterTradeIreland, with €13 million available in each jurisdiction, and it is aimed squarely at industrial manufacturers willing to try something that hasn't been done before.
Most of the conversation so far has been about the money. We think the more useful question for applicants is about evidence: how do you show a funder where your site starts, and how will you prove the project moved it?
The fund backs first-of-a-kind industrial sustainability projects in four challenge areas:
Projects must deliver an environmental improvement and benefit the all-island economy. The fund builds on the €20 million Shared Island Sustainability Capital Grant awards made in December 2025, which have so far leveraged €63.5 million in private investment. Public funding here is designed to pull in private capital, which makes a clear, measurable objective all the more important.
A first-of-a-kind project is, by definition, unproven. Funders manage that risk by asking applicants to be rigorous about everything that can be known: the starting position, the expected change and the method for demonstrating it.
The published announcement doesn't prescribe a particular standard. But any assessor weighing a novel decarbonisation project will ask the same three questions. What are your emissions and energy use today? How much of that does this project address? How will you verify the result once it is running?
Applicants who can answer with a documented baseline are in a very different position from those who answer with estimates. A claimed reduction of any size means little against an unmeasured starting point. It means a great deal against a baseline that has been calculated to a recognised standard.
These are the two reference points for organisational carbon footprints, and they work well together.
The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard is the most widely used accounting framework. It sorts emissions into Scope 1 (direct), Scope 2 (purchased energy, reported using both location-based and market-based methods) and Scope 3 (value chain). ISO 14064-1 specifies how an organisation quantifies and reports its greenhouse gas inventory in a way that can be independently verified under ISO 14064-3.
For an applicant, the practical value lies in the discipline both impose:
For the project itself, ISO 14064-2 sets out how to quantify the reductions from a specific intervention, which is the question a project-based fund is ultimately asking. A site-level baseline gives that calculation something solid to stand on.
Carbon figures tell a funder what you emit. They don't always show why. ISO 50001 fills that gap. Its energy review identifies your significant energy uses, and its energy baseline and energy performance indicators (EnPIs) give you a way to track consumption against production over time.
That matters most for electrification and efficiency projects, where the case rests on load profiles, demand patterns and how a new process behaves against the old one. If you can show a full year of normalised energy data by process, your application stops being a forecast and starts being an engineering argument.
Water and resource efficiency projects benefit from the same thinking applied more widely, and an ISO 14001 environmental management system provides the framework for it.
The baseline doesn't stop being useful once the application is in. If you are successful, you will be reporting against what you promised, and the same inventory becomes the benchmark for post-grant reporting. Repeating the calculation on the same boundary and method each year shows the change directly, without a reconciliation exercise.
It also feeds the wider journey. A verified baseline is the starting point for setting reduction targets, sequencing investments and responding to customer requests for emissions data, which are reaching manufacturers' supply chains with increasing frequency.
If you are considering an application, here is where we would start this month:
None of this is wasted effort if you decide not to apply. A credible baseline is the foundation for every net zero decision that follows.
If you are weighing an application to the Shared Island Sustainability Challenge Fund, talk to us about getting your baseline in place: CGBC Sustainability Consultancy.
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