United Nations
Development Programme

The natural environment protection programme is implemented by the Polish UNDP office in co-operation with the Polish Government and local partners and financed from the Global Environment Facility GEF. Since 1994, GEF has been distributing small, medium and large grants to NGOs. Since 2004, UNDP in Poland has also been managing projects financed from the EU EQUAL Initiative which include elements of environmental protection - Czarna Owca (Black Sheep) and Ekoszansa (EcoChance).

The main objective of GEF is to protect the global, natural environment by financing programmes and projects in the following four areas, given priority status on our planet. These include: protection of biodiversity, preventing climate changes, protection of international waters and counteracting soil degradation (to the extent it is related to the other three criteria). The Fund's resources, supplied by the richest countries of the World (but also later by some of the beneficiaries) are allocated to the countries which are unable to deal with such global challenges on their own.

In Poland, GEF has been the source of the so-called small, medium and large grants. Projects co-financed by GEF must fall within at least one of the areas referred to above. The GEF Small Grants Programme GEF/SGP was introduced by Poland's UNDP Office in 1994. Since it was launched in Poland, the programme provided grants to 385 projects from entire Poland, totalling USD 6.7 million. The subsidies resulted in the mobilisation of funding from other sources in the amount of USD 24 million. Programme has finished it's activities in Poland on 30 July 2008. List of all financed projects can be found on the global SGP web page: http://sgp.undp.org.

Basing upon the positive experiences of the SGP programme, the UNDP Office in Poland also launched operations related to the Medium and Large GEF Grants. In 2002, two "medium-size" projects have been signed in the area of preventing climate changes ("Gdańsk bicycle investment and promotional project – Bicycle Pahts” and "Integrated approach to the utilisation of wood waste products in heating energy generation in Poland - Biomass"), in 2004 one "large" programme was adopted („Programme for energy-efficient use of electric motors PEMP – Electric Motors”) and in 2005 another "medium" project was adopted ("Ecodevelopment of Barycz River Valley”).

The Czarna Owca (Black Sheep) and Ekoszansa (EcoChance) projects, implemented with the participation of the European Social Fund EFS within the scope of EU EQUAL Initiative assume the utilisation of ecological and natural environment assets in the resocialisation of prison inmates and supporting their return to the labour market (Black Sheep) and in the creation of labour conditions to persons infected with HIV and drug addicts (EcoChance).