The UK has fallen nearly 40% behind on its pledge to rapidly scale up climate finance for developing countries, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
A freedom-of-information (FOI) request reveals that, rather than rising steadily to meet a target of £11.6bn over five years, UK climate spending overseas has fallen for two years in a row.
It is now around £2bn off track – assuming there should have been even progress towards the goal.
Boris Johnson’s government, with current prime minister Rishi Sunak as chancellor, committed in 2019 to ramping up its international climate finance (ICF) in order to reach a target of £11.6bn between the financial years 2021/22 and 2025/26.
The figures obtained by Carbon Brief show that UK spending has dipped from £1.56bn in 2020/21 to £1.47bn in 2021/22 – and around £1.36bn in 2022/23.
The numbers for 2022/23 are described in the FOI release as “provisional”, but the total sum is similar to one recently reported by the Guardian, based on leaked civil service documents.
Carbon Brief understands that the government’s figures for that period could be revised upwards when the final numbers are released, but are still likely to fall short of the £11.6bn trajectory.
The government would now have to roughly double its recent annual spending over the next three years, on average, if it is to stand any chance of delivering its pledge.
The UK is facing mounting pressure to provide more money to help vulnerable nations deal with climate change. Yet the government has slashed its overall budget for foreign aid, citing economic pressures at home. It has also redirected some of its foreign-aid spending towards the domestic processing of asylum-seekers.
Climate-finance experts tell Carbon Brief that the current shortfall is “troubling”, adding that it will now be “highly challenging” for the UK to achieve its goals without strong political will.
£11.6bn pledge
Former prime minister Boris Johnson announced in 2019 that the UK would spend £11.6bn on ICF between the financial years 2021/22 and 2025/26.
This has since been reinforced by his successor, Rishi Sunak, who told leaders at the COP27 climate summit in 2022 that he “profoundly believe[s] it is the right thing to do”.
The target doubled the government’s previous five-year pledge to spend “at least £5.8bn” on tackling climate change between 2016/17 and 2020/21 – a goal that has been achieved.
Both targets make up the UK’s contribution to a wider promise by all developed countries, as part of the Paris Agreement, to ramp up climate finance for developing countries to $100bn a year by 2020. Three years on, these nations are still yet to reach this target.
Without significantly increased climate finance, developing nations say they will not be able to transition to low-carbon economies and protect their people from climate hazards.
The UK’s climate finance spending has been under intense scrutiny in recent years.
First, the government slashed its overall development aid spending from the UN-backed benchmark of 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI), citing the economic shock of Covid-19. Climate projects are among the many under threat from cuts.
Since then, the expansion of military aid to Ukraine and diversion of foreign aid to support refugees arriving in the UK have sucked up more of the shrinking resource pool.
In July, the Guardian reported on a leaked civil service briefing for ministers, explaining why the combination of these factors would justify dropping the £11.6bn goal altogether. The government has denied that it intends to drop the pledge.
Responding to a written question on 17 July, development minister Andrew Mitchell confirmed that the UK had spent “over £1.4bn” on ICF in 2021/22. However, he did not share data for 2022/23 or plans for spending out to 2025/26.
FOI requests
Carbon Brief submitted FOI requests to the three government departments responsible for running climate-related development projects: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO); the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); and the now-defunct Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
They provided data on ICF spending between 2011/12 and 2022/23, although Defra withheld its 2022/23 data, stating it was “yet to finalise” it. Both the other departments provided this data, with the caveat that the figures were “provisional”.
(For in-depth analysis of more than a decade of climate finance spending, see Carbon Brief’s full analysis.)
The annual totals, broken down by financial year, can be seen in the chart below. (Spending by Defra, which makes up roughly 3% of total climate finance, has been estimated for 2022/23 based on the average spend over the previous five years.)
Annual ICF spending has more than tripled since the UK started officially providing it in 2011. However, as the data obtained by Carbon Brief shows, for the past two years it has been in decline, pushing the £11.6bn goal further out of reach.
If the £11.6bn target had been split evenly over the five years covered by the pledge, the UK would have spent £2.32bn annually on climate finance between 2021/22 and 2025/26.
So far, however, the government has fallen far short of this, spending £1.46bn in 2021/22 and just £1.36bn in 2022/23. This amounts to a £1.81bn – or 39% – shortfall over the two-year period, relative to even progress towards the £11.6bn goal.
If the government is still to meet its £11.6bn target, climate finance would have to more than double to £2.92bn in 2023/24 and stay that high until 2025/26 – an unprecedented increase.
The 2022/23 figure obtained by Carbon Brief aligns with the Guardian’s reporting on a leaked civil service document, which “confirmed” that ICF spend for 2022/23 was £1.35bn – and expected to rise to around £1.59bn in 2023/24.
Despite this confirmation, Carbon Brief understands that, when the final spending total for 2022/23 is released, it could be higher.
Jonathan Beynon, a senior policy associate at the Center for Global Development who, until 2022, worked for FCDO on climate finance and other issues, tells Carbon Brief this could be achieved in part by reclassifying more funds within existing foreign aid projects as climate-related. Again, this was mentioned in the leaked document.
A government spokesperson tells Carbon Brief that “the government remains committed to spending £11.6bn on international climate finance and we are delivering on that pledge”, adding that “we will publish the latest annual figures in due course”.
‘Shockingly low’
All of this means that the £11.6bn target is slipping out of reach, according to former Conservative FCDO minister Zac Goldsmith, who resigned from government in June, citing its “apathy” towards climate change and the environment. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Technically, [the target] does remain government policy, but the shockingly low levels of expenditure make it a mathematical impossibility that the promise can be kept. Among beleaguered and hard-working civil servants this is an open secret and well understood. Indeed, the only way the promise can be kept is if the next government in its first year spends well over 80% of all its bilateral spending on climate, which clearly cannot happen with all the other important commitments we have.”
Clare Shakya, a climate finance expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), tells Carbon Brief it would be “highly challenging” for the government to “double the level of spending in a year and still ensure the projects and programmes it was supporting were of good quality”.
Faten Aggad, a climate diplomacy expert and adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town, agrees that it is “doubtful” the UK government would prioritise climate spending with its current economic outlook and a general election looming. She tells Carbon Brief:
“Engagements of the current government also show that the commitment to the climate agenda is not as strong as one might have hoped. So I would be surprised to see the spending doubled.”
However, Beynon tells Carbon Brief a “backloaded trajectory” – where spending started off relatively low and then increased more towards the end – was always envisaged for the five-year £11.6bn target period. (This is confirmed in the Guardian’s reporting, which says the government’s internal target for ICF spending in 2022/23 had been £1.77bn.)
He notes that the same pattern can be seen in the previous five-year target period, which still resulted in the goal being successfully met. A slow start can reflect the time taken for new climate projects to be set up and developed.
That said, Beynon adds that he would have expected an “uplift” by 2022/23, so the trend continuing downwards would be “troubling”. As for whether the target can still be achieved, he says:
“The short answer is: it’s possible, but it’s challenging…Primarily because of the wider context – the cuts in ODA [official development assistance] and the decision to choose to spend a good chunk of that ODA on hosting refugees.”
While developed countries are technically allowed to spend some of their aid budget on housing refugees, the UK spent an unusually high amount – around 30% – on this in 2022, to accommodate people arriving from Ukraine and Afghanistan. Only three nations, none of them major aid providers, spent higher proportions of their development aid in this way.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that, depending on the government in charge and how much they prioritise international development, the target could still be achieved.
“The goal is certainly within reach if the political will is there to achieve it,” Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh, tells Carbon Brief.
The Treasury has confirmed that foreign-aid spending will likely not be restored to 0.7% of GNI until at least beyond 2027/28, if the Conservative government remains in power – two years after the £11.6bn deadline. The opposition Labour party has said it will examine a “pathway back to 0.7%” over the course of the next parliament, if it wins the upcoming general election.
Beynon says that, with such widely publicised targets in place, climate-related development spending has, in his view, been “relatively protected”, compared to other areas of development aid that have felt the impact of cuts.
At the recent G20 summit in India, Sunak announced a pledge of £1.62bn in climate finance to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), described by the government as a “major contribution” towards its £11.6bn commitment.
Yet given the wider state of UK climate finance, Goldsmith says the prime minister, or chancellor Jeremy Hunt, would need to “personally intervene” to bring the UK back on track for the goal. Goldsmith criticises Sunak for “pretending we are on course when [he knows] we simply are not”.
Experts warn that a failure to scale up climate finance would seriously threaten the UK’s international reputation. Shakya says:
“If the UK does not meet its own promised contributions, this will not only impact the UK’s standing, but also whether any rich countries can be trusted.”
In less than two months, Sunak will travel to COP28 in Dubai where there will once again be significant pressure placed on developed countries to meet their existing climate-finance pledges – as well as raise the bar higher in the coming years.
The post Analysis: How the UK has fallen 40% behind on its £11.6bn climate-finance pledge appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: How the UK has fallen 40% behind on its £11.6bn climate-finance pledge
At 12.33pm on Monday 28 April, most of Spain and Portugal were plunged into chaos by a blackout.
While the initial trigger remains uncertain, the nationwide blackouts took place after around 15 gigawatts (GW) of electricity generating capacity – equivalent to 60% of Spain’s power demand at the time – dropped off the system within the space of five seconds.
The blackouts left millions of people without power, with trains, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access failing across the Iberian peninsula.
By Tuesday morning, almost all electricity supplies across Spain and Portugal had been restored, but questions about the root cause remained.
Many media outlets were quick to – despite very little available data or information – blame renewables, net-zero or the energy transition for the blackout, even if only by association, by highlighting the key role solar power plays in the region’s electricity mix.
Below, Carbon Brief examines what is known about the Spanish and Portuguese power cuts, the role of renewables and how the media has responded.
What happened and what was the impact?
The near-total power outage in the Iberian Peninsula on Monday affected millions of people.
Spain and Portugal experienced the most extensive blackouts, but Andorra also reported outages, as did the Basque region of France. According to Reuters, the blackout was the biggest in Europe’s history.
In a conference call with reporters, Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica set out the order of events.
Shortly after 12.30pm, the grid suffered an “event” akin to loss of power generation, according to a summary of the call posted by Bloomberg’s energy and commodities columnist Javier Blas on LinkedIn. While the grid almost immediately self-stabilised and recovered, about 1.5 seconds later a second “event” hit, he wrote.
Around 3.5 seconds later, the interconnector between the Spanish region of Catalonia and south-west France was disconnected due to grid instability. Immediately after this, there was a “massive” loss of power on the system, Blas said.
This caused the power grid to “cascade down into collapse”, causing the “unexplained disappearance” of 60% of Spain’s generation, according to Politico.
It quoted Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who told a press conference late on Monday that the causes were not yet known:
“This has never happened before. And what caused it is something that the experts have not yet established – but they will.”
The figure below shows the sudden loss of 15GW of generating capacity from the Spanish grid at 12.33pm on Monday. In addition, a further 5GW disconnected from the Portuguese grid.
The Guardian noted in its coverage that “while the system weathered the first event, it could not cope with the second”.
A separate piece from the publication added that “barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout”.
El País reported that “the power cut…paralysed the normal functioning of infrastructures, telecommunications, roads, train stations, airports, stores and buildings. Hospitals have not been impacted as they are using generators.”
According to Spanish newswire EFE, “hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets, forced to walk long distances home due to paralysed metro and commuter train services, without mobile apps as telecommunications networks also faltered”.
It added that between 30,000 and 35,000 passengers had to be evacuated from stranded trains.
The New York Times reported that Portuguese banks and schools closed, while ATMs stopped working across the country and Spain. People “crammed into stores to buy food and other essentials as clerks used pen and paper to record cash-only transactions”, it added.
Spain’s interior ministry declared a national emergency, according to Reuters, deploying 30,000 police to keep order.
Both Spain and Portugal convened emergency cabinet meetings, with Spain’s King Felipe VI chairing a national security council meeting on Tuesday to discuss an investigation into the power outage, Sky News reported.
By 10pm on Monday, 421 out of Spain’s 680 substations were back online, meaning that 43% of expected power demand was being met, reported the Guardian.
By Tuesday morning, more than 99% of the total electricity supply had been recovered, according to Politico, quoting Red Eléctrica.
In Portugal, power had been restored to every substation on the country’s grid by 11.30pm on Monday. In a statement released on Tuesday, Portuguese grid operator REN said the grid had been “fully stabilised”.
What caused the power cuts?
In the wake of the power cuts, politicians, industry professionals, media outlets, armchair experts and the wider public scrambled to make sense of what had just happened.
Spanish prime minister Sánchez said on the afternoon of the blackout that the government did not have “conclusive information” on its cause, adding that it “[did] not rule out any hypothesis”, Spanish newspaper Diario Sur reported.
Nevertheless, some early theories were quickly rejected by officials.
Red Eléctrica, “preliminarily ruled out that the blackout was due to a cyberattack, human error or a meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon”, El País reported the day after the event.
Politico noted that “people in the street in Spain and some local politicians” had speculated about a cyberattack.
However, it quoted Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services, saying that while the conclusions were preliminary, the operator had “been able to conclude that there has not been any type of intrusion in the electrical network control systems that could have caused the incident”.
The Majorca Daily Bulletin reported that Spain’s High Court said it would open an investigation into whether the event was the result of a cyberattack.
Initial reporting by news agencies blamed the power cuts on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, citing the Portuguese grid operator REN, according to the Guardian. The newspaper added that REN later said this statement had been incorrectly attributed to it.
The phenomenon in question was described as an “induced atmospheric vibration”.
Prof Mehdi Seyedmahmoudian, an electrical engineer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, explained in the Conversation that this was “not a commonly used term”.
Nevertheless, he said the phenomenon being described was familiar, referring to “wavelike movements” in the atmosphere caused by sudden changes in temperature or pressure.
In general terms, Reuters explained that power cuts are often linked to extreme weather, but that the “weather at the time of Monday’s collapse was fair”. It added that faults at power stations, power distribution lines or substations can also trigger outages.
Another theory was that a divergence of electrical frequency from 50 cycles per second (Hz), the European standard, could have caused parts of the system to shut down in order to protect equipment, France 24 explained.
Some analysts noted that “oscillations” in grid frequency shortly before the events in Spain and Portugal could be related to the power cuts. Tobias Burke, policy manager at Energy UK, explained this theory in his Substack:
“The fact these frequency oscillations mirrored those in Latvia…at the other extreme of the Europe-spanning ENTSO-E network, might suggest complex inter-area oscillations across markets could be the culprit.”
This phenomenon can be seen in a chart shared by Prof Lion Hirth, an energy researcher at Hertie School, on LinkedIn.
With many details still unknown, much of the media speculation has focused on the role that renewable energy could have played in the blackouts. (See: Did renewable energy play a role in the cut?)
Many of the experts cited in the media emphasised the complexity of determining the cause of the outages. Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute Europe, was quoted by the Associated Press stating:
“There’s a variety of things that usually happen at the same time and it’s very difficult for any event to say ‘this was the root cause’.”
Nevertheless, there are several efforts now underway to determine what the causes were.
Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, announced on Tuesday that the government would set up an independent technical commission to investigate the blackouts, while stressing that the problem had originated in Spain, according to Euractiv.
Finally, EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen has indicated that the EU will open a “thorough investigation” into the reasons behind the power cuts, BBC News noted.
Did renewable energy play a role in the blackouts?
As commentators began to look into the cause of the blackout, many pointed to the high share of renewables in Spain’s electricity mix.
On 16 April, Spain’s grid had run entirely on renewable sources for a full day for the first time ever, with wind accounting for 46% of total output, solar 27%, hydroelectric 23% and solar thermal and others meeting the rest, according to PV Magazine.
Spain is targeting 81% renewable power by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
At the time of the blackout on Monday, solar accounted for 59% of the country’s electricity supplies, wind nearly 12%, nuclear 11% and gas around 5%, reported the Independent.
The initial “event” is thought to have originated in the south-western region of Extremadura, noted Politico, “which is home to the country’s most powerful nuclear power plant, some of its largest hydroelectric dams and numerous solar farms.”
On Tuesday, Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services Eduardo Prieta said that it was “very possible that the affected generation [in the initial ‘events’] could be solar”.
This sparked further speculation about how grids that are highly reliant on variable renewables can be managed so as to ensure security of supply.
Political groups such as the far-right VOX – which has historically pushed back against climate action such as the expansion of renewables – also pointed to the blackout as evidence of “the importance of a balanced energy mix”.
However, others rejected this suggestion, with EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen telling Bloomberg that the blackout could not be pinned on a “specific source of energy”:
“As far as we know, there was nothing unusual about the sources of energy supplying electricity to the system yesterday. So the causes of the blackout cannot be reduced to a specific source of energy, for instance renewables.”
Others have sought to highlight that, while it was possible solar power was involved in the initial frequency event, this does not mean that it was ultimately the cause of the blackout.
Writing on LinkedIn, chief technology officer of Arenko, a renewable energy software company, Roger Hollies, noted:
“The initial trip may well have been a solar plant, but trips happen all the time across all asset types. Networks should be designed to withstand multiple loss of generators. 15GW is not one power station, this is the equivalent of 10 large gas or nuclear power stations or 75 solar parks.”
Others pointed to what they said was insufficient nuclear power on the grid – a notion that prime minister Sánchez rejected, according to El País.
Speaking on Tuesday, he said that those arguing the blackouts showed a need for more nuclear power were “either lying or showing ignorance”, according to the newspaper. It said he highlighted that nuclear plants were yet to fully recover from the event.
One key aspect of the transition away from electricity systems built around thermal power stations burning coal, gas or uranium is a loss of “inertia”, the Financial Times highlighted.
Thermal power plants generate electricity using large spinning turbines, which rotate at the same 50 cycles per second (Hz) speed as the electrical grid oscillates. The weight of these “large lump[s] of spinning metal” gives them “inertia”, which counteracts changes in frequency on the rest of the grid.
When faults cause a rise or fall in grid frequency, this inertia helps lower the rate of change of frequency, giving system operators more time to respond, noted Adam Bell, director of policy at Stonehaven, in a post on LinkedIn.
Solar does not include a spinning generator, and therefore, critics pointed to the lack of inertia on the grid due to the high levels of the technology as a cause of the blackout.
As Bell pointed out, this ignores the inertia provided by nuclear, hydro and solar thermal on the grid at the time of the blackout, alongside the Spanish grid operator having built “synchronous condensers” to help boost inertia and grid stability.
Bell added:
“A lack of inertia was therefore not the main driver for the blackout. Indeed, post the frequency event, no fossil generation remained online – but wind, solar and hydro did.”
While the ultimate cause of the blackouts remains to be seen, they have highlighted the need for an increased focus on grid stability, particularly as the economy is electrified.
A selection of comments from experts published in Review Energy emphasises the need for further resilience to be built into the grid as it transitions away from fossil fuels.
How has the media responded to the power cut?
As the crisis was still unfolding and its cause remained unknown, several climate-sceptic right-leaning UK publications clamoured to draw a link between the blackouts and the nations’ reliance on renewable energy.
It comes as right-leaning titles have stepped up their campaigning against climate policy over the past year.
On Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph carried a frontpage story headlined: “Net-zero blamed for blackout chaos.”
But the article contradicted its own headline by concluding: “What exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one.”
None of the experts quoted in the piece blamed “net-zero” for the incident.
The Daily Telegraph also carried an editorial seeking to argue renewable energy was the cause of the blackouts, which claimed that “over-reliance on renewables means a less resilient grid”.
The Daily Express had an editorial (not online) claiming that the blackout shows “relying on renewables is dim”.
Additionally, the Standard carried a comment by notorious climate-sceptic commentator Ross Clark breathlessly blaming the blackout on “unreliable” renewables, with a fear-monguering warning that the “same could happen in the UK”.
The Daily Mail published a comment by Rupert Darwall, a climate-sceptic author who is part of the CO2 Coalition – an organisation seeking to promote “the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives” – which claimed that the blackout showed “energy security is being sacrificed at the altar of green dogma”.
Climate-sceptic libertarian publication Spiked had a piece by its deputy editor Fraser Myers titled: “Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by net-zero.” The article claimed that “our elites’ embrace of green ideology has divorced them from reality”.
In Spanish media, Jordi Sevilla, the former president of Red Eléctrica, wrote in the financial publication Cinco Días that, while it is not known what caused the blackout, it is clear that the country’s grid “requires investments to adapt to the technical reality of the new generation mix”. He continued:
“In Spain, in the last decade, there has been a revolution in electricity generation to the point that renewable technologies ([solar] photovoltaic and wind, above all) now occupy the majority of the energy mix. This has had very positive impacts on CO2 emissions, lower electricity prices and increased national autonomy.
“But there is a technical problem: photovoltaic and wind power are not synchronous energies, whereas our transmission and distribution networks are designed to operate only with a minimum voltage in the energy they transport. Therefore, to operate with current technology, the electrical system must maintain synchronous backup power, which can be hydroelectric, gas or nuclear, to be used when photovoltaic and wind power are insufficient, either due to their intermittent nature (there may be no sun or wind) or due to the lack of synchronisation required by the generators to operate.”
For Bloomberg, opinion columnist Javier Blas said that “Spain’s blackout shouldn’t trigger a retreat from renewables”, but shows that “an upgraded grid is urgently needed for the energy transition”. He added:
“The world didn’t walk away from fossil-fuel and nuclear power stations because New York suffered a massive blackout in 1977. And it shouldn’t walk away from solar and wind because Spain and Portugal lost power for a few hours.
“But we should learn that grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources.”
The post Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What we do – and do not – know about the blackout in Spain and Portugal
The “vast majority” of the UK government’s plans to prepare for climate hazards have made virtually no progress over the past two years, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
In that time, the world has experienced the hottest year on record, while England has seen its wettest ever 18-month stretch between 2022 and 2024.
(Climate adaptation – outside of some issues such as defence – is mostly a devolved matter, with separate plans in place from the administrations for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.)
The previous government introduced a new adaptation strategy for England in 2023, covering plans for rising temperatures and more extreme weather in the country.
However, in its latest analysis of the government’s progress, the CCC states that the current approach to adaptation in England is “not working” and requires “urgent strengthening”.
The government is failing to make “good” progress in adapting to climate change on any of the 46 outcomes measured by the committee, ranging from better healthcare during heatwaves to preparing financial institutions for climate risk.
The report marks the latest in a series of appraisals by the CCC that have repeatedly identified large gaps in the nation’s adaptation efforts.
This time, with a relatively new Labour government that has said it will act on adaptation, the committee says its report “must serve as the turning point”.
But the CCC also says it is “seriously concerned” that the government will cut funding for adaptation, ultimately leading to much higher future costs as temperatures continue to rise.
- Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
- What progress has been made?
- What does the CCC recommend?
- How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
Climate adaptation is ‘vital’
There is “unequivocal evidence” that climate change is already making extreme weather in the UK “more likely and more extreme”, the CCC says.
The report lays out major risks facing the country, noting that the number of properties at risk from flooding is set to increase from 6.3m today to 8m by 2050. Roads and railways at risk from flooding could increase from a third of the total length to half over the same timeframe.
At least 59% of top-quality farmland is already at risk from flooding, the report says, adding that this could also increase over the coming decades.
Meanwhile, annual heat-related deaths could increase “several times over” to pass 10,000 in an average year by 2050, the CCC says.
It also cites an Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) report from 2024 that concludes the UK’s GDP could be around 3% lower by 2074, even under the Paris Agreement’s “below 2C” goal. It says this could increase to 5% in a “below 3C” scenario, according to the OBR.
High-quality climate adaptation is therefore “vital to ensure that these risks are managed most efficiently and at least cost”, according to the committee. Otherwise, government policy could “lock in” risks or even make them worse.
The CCC reports on adaptation progress in England every two years, as required under the 2008 Climate Change Act. These reports have consistently highlighted adaptation as an issue that has been “underfunded and ignored” by successive governments.
There have been a few major developments since the committee’s last report.
Notably, the previous Conservative government launched its third national adaptation programme (NAP3), which is the cornerstone of the nation’s adaptation policy, in summer 2023. (NAP3 covers adaptation policy in England, as well as non-devolved issues that affect the whole UK, such as defence.)
In a highly critical initial appraisal of the programme, the CCC concluded that it fell “far short of what is needed” and “must be strengthened”. NAP3 has also faced an ultimately unsuccessful legal challenge from activists, arguing that it breached people’s human rights.
Another big development since the committee’s last report is Labour winning the general election in 2024. The CCC acknowledges that the new government “inherited a NAP that fell short of the task”, but says it finds “little evidence of a change of course”.
What progress has been made?
The report looks at both the “policies and plans” underpinning climate adaptation, as well as the actual “delivery and implementation” of those plans. It states:
“Whilst there is some evidence of policies and plans improving [since 2023], it is clear that NAP3 has been ineffective in driving the critical shift towards effective delivery of adaptation.”
The CCC assesses the planning and delivery of 46 outcomes from adaptation policy across five overarching themes. It scores them using roughly the same monitoring framework used in its last report in 2023.
It notes that 11 policies and plans have improved over the past two years, including a new adaptation strategy from the Ministry of Justice and a green finance strategy.
Over the same period, it says four have gotten worse, among them investment in flood protection projects, as “plans no longer align with their stated objectives”.
The lack of significant improvement between 2023 and 2025, based on the CCC’s scoring system, can be seen in the chart below.
As for the government actually delivering on its plans, the CCC says the “vast majority of our outcomes have received the same score as in 2023, most at low levels”.
The small number of improvements mainly relate to the latest round of implementation of the “adaptation reporting power”, which allows the government to ask infrastructure providers to disclose how they deal with climate risks.
The chart below, which compares the scores given to different adaptation outcomes between 2023 and 2025, demonstrates the lack of progress in the intervening years.
The CCC concludes that none of the outcomes could be classified as making “good” progress, in terms of delivery. Only four of them saw improvements over this period.
It highlights the water supply as an area where there has been backsliding over the past two years, noting that “continued slow rate of leakage reduction is now clearly inconsistent with meeting the sector’s targets”.
The CCC also points out that “tracking progress on adaptation remains challenging due to limited national-scale, up-to-date and relevant data”.
While there has been an improvement since 2023, nine of the 46 assessed outcomes for England still lacked enough evidence to assess progress, the report says.
These include important areas such as the impact of climate change on food supplies and the vulnerability of telecommunications and information and communication technology (ICT) assets.
In addition, ahead of NAP3, the CCC recommended – as part of its 2023 progress report – a list of 89 actions to close what it viewed as “policy gaps in government’s adaptation planning”.
It suggested that these could be dealt with either in NAP3 itself, or as part of other policy programmes.
However, only four of these recommendations have been achieved, with a further 14 seeing “partial progress”.
The report highlights food security, community preparedness and buildings as some of the areas where the government did not follow through on its recommendations.
What does the CCC recommend?
The CCC’s report echoes previous advice that, despite some improvements in NAP3 on previous efforts, the nation’s climate adaptation strategy needs an overhaul:
“The UK’s current approach to adaptation policy making is not working. Adaptation is not the cross-government priority that it needs to be, which is holding back delivery.”
NAP3 covers a five-year period from 2023 to 2028. With the latest report coming at a halfway point in this cycle, the committee says it “must serve as the turning point” for the government on climate adaptation.
As part of the “urgent strengthening” suggested in the report, the committee sets out key areas that it says should be improved.
“Adaptation” can mean different things in different contexts. The CCC stresses the need for a set of “specific and measurable sectoral targets” that can be used to guide progress, with clarity on how to monitor them and who is responsible.
The government has signalled its intention to strengthen adaptation objectives. The committee says that such objectives “must” be developed as a priority, no later than the end of 2025.
The CCC report highlights the “data gaps” that need to be closed, with “monitoring and evaluation…still not treated with sufficient urgency”. It says the government should direct relevant agencies to collect data on climate risks and the delivery of adaptation measures.
Adaptation is a topic that affects every area of government, from healthcare to education. Yet the CCC highlights that there is not enough coordination of activities between departments and says this should be improved.
In order to carry out adaptation policies, the CCC also stresses that the government “needs to ensure sufficient funding is available” as it undertakes its spending review. Baroness Brown, chair of the CCC’s adaptation committee, told journalists in a press briefing:
“We are seriously concerned that resilience and climate adaptation may be cut in the spending review. [The] government needs to recognise that this is not a future problem, this is today’s problem…I know the government is under a lot of pressure to make cuts, but this isn’t the easy one.”
Given the cost of future climate risk, the committee stresses that ignoring adaptation would not, ultimately, save money. In fact, acting early would “minimise the overall costs of tackling climate change”, it explains.
In the press briefing, CCC chief executive Emma Pinchbeck emphasised the “real need” for the government to think about the future when implementing key policies, such as home-building programmes and other major infrastructure developments.
“If you think about potential waste in terms of investment into the NHS, if we then have to retrofit hospitals to make them cooler,” she said, as an example.
How prepared are different sectors for climate change?
The CCC progress report looks at specific outcomes broken down across five broad sectors.
Within these, it highlights key problems and makes specific recommendations for each area.
Land, nature and food
The CCC highlights various “foundational” strategies covering farming and land that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is expected to publish in the coming months, including the land-use framework and the food strategy.
Delays in publishing such documents have “hampered” adaptation progress. However, the report highlights them as opportunities to set out clear objectives and responsibilities for the sector.
As it stands, important issues such as boosting climate-resilient farming and protecting food supply chains are rated “insufficient” for both government planning and implementation.
The CCC highlights the relatively new “environmental land management schemes” (Elms), which constitute England’s successor to the EU’s farm payments policy.
The report says these schemes lack guidance for climate adaptation, adding that the government should provide “certainty” about how much farmers will be paid for such measures.
As for the fishing industry, the report has downgraded its climate-adaptation plans, noting that they “no longer look credible”. It says the government’s marine strategy, published earlier this year, “does not include any specific or targeted adaptation actions”.
Infrastructure
According to the CCC, when the government publishes its 10-year infrastructure strategy, it should set out “clear resilience standards” for new infrastructure projects.
It also notes that major funding packages – for new roads and electricity networks, for example – should include incentives to fund climate adaptation.
Two out of the three adaptation policies that are scored as “good” are in the infrastructure sector, namely the plans for maintaining reliability in the road and rail networks.
Despite this, actual progress in improving transport resilience is largely “stagnant”, the committee says. It highlights increased flooding on railways and an increased number of roads deemed “susceptible” to flooding.
This is also the sector that has seen the most improvement in terms of delivery and implementation. The water, energy, telecommunications and transport sectors are all described as improving the identification and management of “interdependencies”.
This refers to better evidence of links between different sectors, which is being unveiled via adaptation reporting power. Notably, none of the sectors that have seen improvements are rated as “good”, indicating they still have work to do in this area.
Built environment and communities
Flooding is highlighted as the key risk facing many communities around England.
While the Environment Agency-led flood defence programme has been successful, “its budget in real terms is shrinking as risks are escalating, meaning delivery is falling short of targets and the condition of flood defence assets is declining”, according to the CCC.
The government’s investment programme needs “long-term” targets for cutting the risk posed by floods and coastal erosion, supported by sufficient funds, the report concludes.
It also recommends a “long-term cross-sector plan to manage future heat risk and drive joined-up action”.
The CCC is currently unable to track many of the important measures around heat risk, such as how many buildings are overheating, due to a lack of data.
Overall, none of the efforts to implement better protections for homes and communities have seen any positive change since 2023, despite this being a record period of heat and flooding.
Health and wellbeing
The CCC notes that there are only “limited” policies and plans in place to protect population health and healthcare delivery in the face of escalating climate hazards.
Extreme heat is the main risk identified in this context. As it stands, there are long-term, increasing trends of heat-associated deaths and overheating in hospital settings, the committee says.
In this context, the report recommends that the government develop an “improved climate and public health adaptation plan” that builds on the existing adverse weather and health plan.
Also, as part of the government’s decade-long plan to improve the NHS, the CCC says any upgrades must “make it more resilient to climate extremes today and in the future”.
Economy
The committee says that while businesses can take action to protect their own affairs from climate change, “barriers remain” and adaptation finance “remains nascent”.
It therefore highlights an important role for the government in removing these barriers, providing high-quality information and “correcting market failures”.
The report recommends setting up a portal for adaptation-related data that can be accessed by companies.
It also says the government should ensure that the UK’s sustainable disclosure requirements incorporate “adaptation-related disclosure”, to better prepare the private sector for climate risks.
The CCC also points out that an adaptation finance “deliverables and action plan”, promised for 2024, has not been produced. Among other things, this plan should lay out ways to “mobilise” private investment into adaptation projects, it adds.
The post CCC: England’s approach to climate adaptation is ‘not working’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
CCC: England’s approach to climate adaptation is ‘not working’
As in his first term, US President Donald Trump has again kick-started the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the global pact to tackle climate change. But this time, he has launched a barrage of additional efforts to end US participation in international climate action during his first 100 days in office.
He not only signed an order for the US to leave the Paris Agreement on his first day in the White House on January 20, a process that takes a year from when the UN is notified. His administration has also crippled international climate finance by cutting aid and saying it will not deliver on pledges to climate funds, financed major fossil fuel projects abroad and undermined environmental treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“It is the policy of my Administration to put the interests of the United States and the American people first in the development and negotiation of any international agreements with the potential to damage or stifle the American economy,” said Trump’s day-one executive order on global environmental deals.
However, the implications could be far-reaching and weaken the US geopolitically, analysts warned.
“The Trump Administration is fundamentally dismantling the ability of the US government to project influence around the world,” said Jesse Young, former chief of staff at the Office of the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate under John Podesta, a political adviser to Joe Biden’s government.
“If you take the ball and go home, everyone else still shows up to these fora. It’s not like the party’s cancelled,” Young added. “By withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and doing all this stuff, you make China look better by standing still.”
It is still unclear whether the US will send a delegation to the COP30 UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil, in November, where more than 190 countries are set to discuss a new climate finance roadmap and present updated national climate plans. A no-show for the US would be an unprecedented move for the world’s second-largest carbon polluter.
“The world will keep going,” said Tom di Liberto, public affairs specialist and former climate scientist with the US government. “What we’ve seen is a complete rejection of America’s role in the world.”
Bowing out of the UN climate process
The US leaving the Paris Agreement – although falling short of pulling out of the underlying UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – was the first step in a series of actions meant to undermine climate action on the global stage.
In February, the Trump administration prevented its scientists from attending a key meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held in China, where researchers from UN member states discussed the outlines and deadlines for the world’s upcoming flagship climate science reports.
As part of Trump’s first-day orders, the US also halted all financial contributions to the UNFCCC, leaving the UN climate body with a 22% shortfall in its core budget. In 2024, US contributions totalled $13.3 million.
Shortly after the announcement, American billionaire Michael Bloomberg pledged to fill the funding gap left by the US. Bloomberg Philanthropies had already stepped in during Trump’s first term and is already the UNFCCC’s largest non-state donor.
After Trump’s pullback, Bloomberg promises to fill US funding gap to UN climate body
The United States also failed for the first time to report its climate-warming emissions to the UN, a commitment the US had upheld ever since the UNFCCC was adopted over three decades ago.
And this month, the Trump administration dismantled the entire State Department’s Office for Global Change, which oversees global climate policy and aid, by terminating all of its employees. This was part of a wave of bureaucratic layoffs led by the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by unelected tech billionaire Elon Musk, who owns electric vehicle maker Tesla and social media platform X.
One of the agencies targeted by DOGE was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which could suffer an almost 30% budget cut despite being in charge of key global weather and climate data. Di Liberto was one of the scientists fired from NOAA.
“We’re already seeing the impacts, especially in our national weather service, where we already today cannot forecast the weather 24/7 at local forecast offices,” Di Liberto told journalists on an online briefing.
Many developing countries rely on NOAA’s forecasting to prepare for extreme weather events like hurricanes or drought. In a world of increasing climate impacts, the move could “jeopardize most people’s access to life-saving information”, the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said in a statement.
Also in April, the Trump administration dismissed all the authors of the Sixth National Climate Assessment – a quadrennial scientific report mandated by Congress since 1990 – saying it is being “reevaluated”.
“Trying to bury this report won’t alter the scientific facts one bit, but without this information our country risks flying blind into a world made more dangerous by human-caused climate change,” warned Rachel Cleetus, one of the authors who is a senior policy director for UCS’s Climate and Energy Program.
Crippling climate finance
In his initial executive order to quit the Paris Agreement, Trump made very clear his intention to dramatically cut US contributions to international climate funding by ordering the US Treasury to “immediately cease or revoke any purported financial commitment” under the UNFCCC.
One of the administration’s first targets was the US government aid agency, USAID, which has suffered a dramatic mass layoff of staff and was subjected to a funding freeze. USAID is the world’s largest grant-based bilateral agency, overseeing hundreds of climate programmes now at risk of disappearing.
Speaking to Climate Home in February, workers at USAID-funded projects in Africa warned of “devastating” consequences to the world’s poorest, warning it would make them more susceptible to extreme weather.
USAID’s climate projects included an $84.5 million clean energy rollout across Southern Africa that would grant first-time electricity access to tens of thousands, as well as $22 million to help farming communities in Iraq deal with climate-related drought, and $18.5 million to boost climate resilience in Palestine.
The US has also walked out of coal-to-clean energy Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) with South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, set up by a group of donors to phase down fossil fuels and boost renewables in these growing economies. Together, the deals are worth a combined $45 billion.
Trump has also targeted international climate funds, rescinding a large pledge to the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) in February, leaving a $4-billion shortfall and an empty seat on the fund’s board. The country also gave up its seat on the board of the new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, although the previous administration made good on a previous $17.5-million contribution.
In addition, the US government is putting pressure on global financial institutions that support development around the world. During April’s Spring Meetings, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to drop their climate work, amid fears of a US exit from those agencies.
He said the IMF “devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender and social issues”. The IMF and World Bank chiefs have so far not indicated they will scale back their climate programmes.
Rush for gas and minerals
While cutting funding for climate mitigation, the Trump administration has invested efforts in redirecting international support towards fossil fuel projects, in particular gas.
For instance, back in March, the US Export-Import Bank approved a $4.7-billion loan for a major gas plant in Mozambique described as a “carbon bomb” by experts. The project operated by TotalEnergies is set to emit 121 million tonnes of planet-heating carbon dioxide every year and it would become Africa’s largest-ever energy project.
Trump has also encouraged other countries to buy into the US’s fossil fuel expansion plans, urging Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to commit to a controversial $44-billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Alaska. Asian countries reportedly have diverging views on this, with Taiwan expressing interest and South Korea more hesitant over the costs.
In line with this, the US government has also pushed gas at international energy gatherings. This month, at the International Energy Agency’s Summit for the Future of Energy Security in London, Trump’s envoy criticised renewables, blaming them for recent power cuts in Puerto Rico without providing evidence.
At energy security talks, US pushes gas and derides renewables
Critical minerals – whose global production is currently dominated by China – have featured too in Trump’s foreign policy. Minerals like lithium and cobalt as well as rare earths are key for manufacturing solar cells, batteries and other clean energy technologies. But Trump has set his sights on the military uses of these minerals, analysts told Climate Home.
At peace talks to end the conflicts in both Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the US government has offered “minerals-for-security” deals in an effort to secure key reserves of cobalt and copper in DRC, and graphite and lithium in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in defiance of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Trump administration in April signed an executive order to fast-track controversial deep-sea mining projects planned by Canada-based The Metals Company (TMC). For years, diplomats have tried to set rules for mining the ocean floor at the International Seabed Authority, an UNCLOS body. Trump’s unilateral permitting is set to create international backlash, experts warned.
Xi commits China to full climate plan but emissions-cutting ambition still unclear
Amid the US president’s snubbing of the UN climate process and other global environmental pacts, COP30 host Brazil has called on countries to stay committed to the UNFCCC. China, for example, recently announced it will produce an upgraded national climate plan ahead of COP30, covering all economic sectors and greenhouse gases for the first time.
“Now, we have to make an even greater effort to ensure that multilateralism prevails, and this
has to involve Brazil, China, India, the European Union, South Africa, and all remaining [UNFCCC]
parties,” Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva said in a statement. “Only intense multilateral action can tackle climate change.”
The post Trump’s first 100 days: US walks away from global climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.
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