With the National Climate Initiative (NKI), the Federal Environment Ministry has been supporting climate protection projects throughout Germany since June 2008, contributing to the achievement of Germany's climate protection goals. During this time, the NKI's guidelines and calls for proposals have been further developed, and new guidelines and calls for proposals have been initiated in order to tap strategic climate protection potentials, particularly in the target groups of municipalities, businesses, educational institutions and consumers. All along this process, independent experts have continuously evaluated the impact of the National Climate Initiative, assessed gaps and identified potentials for further development of the NKI. Overall, the effect of the National Climate Initiative to date has been largely positive, also in terms of its contribution to national climate protection targets. Building on their work in the preceding evaluation of the NKI, a consortium of Öko-Institut (lead), ifeu and Ecologic Institute is once again examining and evaluating the initiative's funding programmes for the projects completed in the periods 2022 to 2025 and 2026 to 2027 and developing proposals for their further development.

The project comprises four work packages:

1. Planning: The team updates and adapts the evaluation criteria and the methods handbook on the basis of which the funding programmes will be assessed and supports the further development of the Kommunalrichtlinie's online monitoring tool.
2. Ex-post evaluation: Each of the NKI's six directives and funding calls, covering around 30,000 individual projects, is described and evaluated by means of a performance review and then aggregated to the level of the NKI as a whole.
3. Accompanying evaluations: Selected aspects of individual directives and funding calls are examined in greater depth, drawing on focus groups, online surveys and expert interviews, and offered as core and optional services.
4. Ad hoc work: Short evaluations, expert presentations and economic-efficiency analyses are provided on request to support the ongoing course of the project.

The consortium applies the following approach to the project: First, evaluation criteria are defined. Then the projects are grouped into clusters in order to then map the causal chains within the clusters. Subsequently, data and information are combined, actual results are compared to the target values, and the greenhouse gas savings are calculated. Based on the results, the impacts and transformation effects resulting from the funding programmes are estimated, evaluated and recommendations for the further development of the programmes are developed.

Ecologic Institute is involved in all work packages and leads the work for evaluating the funding call for innovative and transformative climate protection projects.