On Friday 16 April was presented to the public the “Monithon Project Finder” – a new web application created by Monithon in collaboration with the designers and developers of Sheldon Studio, starting from the open data published by OpenCoesione, which helps to locate the projects financed in the environmental sector from European funds 2014-2020.

An interactive map allows to perform a search related to funded projects in Italy per municipality and districts: each pin on the map calls out a project. There are over 7 thousand projects displayed, for an amount of approximately 8.9 billion euros, which can be filtered by Municipality, theme, project category, budget, starting year, and implementation progress. The map displays projects financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) in the 2014-2020 programming period, as classified by OpenCoesione in the following “synthetic themes”: Environment, Energy, Culture, and Tourism. The data update is as of 31st December 2020.

Among the projects, there are all those relating to energy efficiency of public buildings and enterprises, sustainable mobility, prevention and mitigation of hydrogeological risk and climate change, management of the waste cycle, modernization of water networks, wastewater treatment, protection of biodiversity, enhancement of the environmental and natural heritage.

By the means of the Project Finder, the user can select the most interesting projects to evaluate. Once the project has been identified, anyone can start their civic monitoring activities by clicking on the button contained in the description of the selected project. The civic monitor will automatically access the Monithon work area, where she will be guided step by step in the development of the Civic Monitoring Report thanks to the online guide MoniTutor.

4 steps for finding the projects near you and starting the civic monitoring

The map can be navigated freely, although we recommend that you follow the steps below.

1. Locate your municipality

From projectfinder.monithon.eu, the first step is to look for a municipality to start from (top left). The map will focus on the chosen municipality: each dot corresponds to a project, and the color depends on the thematic area (e.g. sustainable mobility or environment). By moving the distance indicator just below right and left, you can establish the size of the radius starting from the center of the municipality, for example to consider only the municipal area, neighboring municipalities or the entire province or metropolitan area.

2. Filter the projects to find something interesting

At the bottom, you can raise the green panel to select the projects: you can filter by “category” (there are 28 and they distinguish the projects on the basis of the main activity carried out), or by budget, year of start, progress and presence of civic monitoring reports on the project, indicating that the same project has already been monitored in the past.

3. Pick a project from the list

To see the resulting list of projects, you need to click on the white panel, bottom right. The projects can be sorted by distance, theme, financial value or starting year.

4. Start monitoring!

By clicking on each project, you access a summary sheet that contains the essential data on the progress and description of the project. From here you can start monitoring: by clicking on the button at the bottom right of the card you will be accompanied immediately (if you are not logged in, just log in) on our work area for creating the report and access all the information and suggestions of the MoniTutor. Of course, you can also access the project sheet by simply clicking on each dot!

“Monithon Project Finder” was created to accompany the activities of the project “A national network for civic monitoring of European funds for the environment and sustainable development”, implemented by Lunaria and Monithon – and co-funded by the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission.