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Since 2011, the UK has spent at least £12.63bn on 490 climate-related projects in developing countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

A new investigation by Carbon Brief reveals exactly how much of the UK’s foreign-aid budget is being used – and how – to help nations in the global south to cut emissions and better prepare for rising temperatures.

Freedom-of-information (FOI) requests submitted to the UK government have yielded new, detailed information about more than a decade of foreign-aid spending on climate change.

This comes at a time of intense scrutiny for the UK’s climate-finance spending, which it is legally bound to deliver under the terms of the Paris Agreement.

The government has slashed its aid budget and, as Carbon Brief’s analysis reveals, fallen behind on its pledge to spend £11.6bn on climate finance between 2021 and 2026.

Key findings from Carbon Brief’s analysis include:

  • Annual climate finance spending has more than tripled from £392.5m in 2011/12 to nearly £1.40bn in 2022/23.
  • Ethiopia has received the most single-country funding overall since 2011, a total of £377.5m. Kenya, Bangladesh and Uganda were also major recipients.
  • Combined with government-reported public and private finance “mobilised” by UK funds, the UK’s total climate-finance contribution reached £26.49bn by 2023.
  • Around 80% of climate funds go to projects targeting “developing countries” in general or regional funds, which are often run by large multilateral institutions.

In this analysis, Carbon Brief walks through the key findings and trends that emerge from this 12-year dataset.

Carbon Brief’s FOI and project database

Developed countries, such as the UK, have committed to providing “climate finance” to developing countries to help them cut emissions and prepare for a warming world.

In practice, this money is generally drawn from countries’ foreign-aid budgets. In the UK, this kind of aid is termed International Climate Finance (ICF).

The nation has been supporting ICF projects since 2011 and, throughout this period, it has funded everything from providing households in Nepal with solar power to ensuring flood-stricken communities in Malawi have enough to eat.

Climate finance is a highly politicised issue and developed countries are under intense pressure to deliver the money they have promised repeatedly to developing countries – and to spend it in ways that are “efficient” and achieve the greatest impact.

Specifically, they have a still-outstanding pledge to raise $100bn annually by 2020 and now must decide on a more ambitious goal by 2024. There are also questions around whether rich countries, including the UK, are paying their “fair share” based on their historic responsibility for climate change.

Over the past decade, the UK has been the world’s fifth-largest national provider of climate finance after – in descending order – Japan, Germany, France and the US, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Carbon Brief carried out an earlier FOI request in 2017, obtaining information about all the climate finance projects the UK had funded since 2011, the year when ICF began. The findings were mapped and presented in full.

The UK government provides a catalogue of its foreign-aid projects on the Development Tracker website. However, while this service allows users to search for projects with an ICF component, it does not provide the breakdown or percentage of how much of each budget is solely allocated for ICF.

The government has also been submitting detailed information about how much funding from its foreign-aid projects is “climate-specific” to the UN. But these reports contain less information than Development Tracker and only go as far as 2020.

Given this, Carbon Brief has successfully repeated its earlier FOI, this time for the financial years 2017/18 to 2022/23. The government provided this data to Carbon Brief in May 2023.

The resulting data has now been combined with the original dataset, plus data extracted from Development Tracker project pages, to produce a new interactive table detailing every project that includes ICF spending between the financial years 2011/12 and 2022/23 – and the amount of funding that is climate-specific for each one. This can be viewed below.

The total includes £12.63bn of climate finance spent across 490 projects over this 11-year period.

Many ICF projects overseen by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and its predecessor the Department for International Development (DFID) are only partly related to climate change, meaning they may also cover other issues, such as education and healthcare. For these projects, only the climate-relevant proportion of spending – as determined by the FCDO – is included in Carbon Brief’s database.

Virtually all of the money included in this table is straightforward ICF. However, in their FOI responses, government departments also provided some additional funds that are counted towards their climate-finance totals.

These include “R&I [research and innovation] funds” – namely the Newton Fund and the Global Challenges Research Fund – which support scientific research in developing countries. Between 2018 and 2023, £117.5m from these funds was used as climate finance. (These funds cover a range of projects but have been grouped together here under one project name.)

While these funds were not initially counted towards the UK’s climate-finance goals, budgetary pressure over the years has led to climate-related projects from these schemes being used to make up ICF totals. The reverse has also happened when climate-related R&I projects were in danger of losing funding.

Another notable outlier is funding for “COP costs”. The government counts £99m that it spent hosting the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 towards its goals.

(A read-only Google Sheet with the full dataset can be viewed here. For more information about this data, see the Methodology section at the end of the article.)

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How much climate finance has the UK spent?

The UK has more than tripled its annual climate-finance spending from £392.5m in 2011/12 to nearly £1.40bn in 2022/23.

In total, it has spent £12.63bn of development aid on ICF programmes across this period. This amounts to around 8% of total foreign-aid spending.

However, ICF funding has dropped over the past two years from a peak of £1.56bn in 2020/21, despite a 2019 government target to significantly scale up climate finance to £11.6bn over five years out to 2025/26. (For more on this dip in climate finance, see Carbon Brief’s separate analysis.)

UK’s annual international climate finance (ICF) spending, £m, by financial year for the period 2011/12 to 2022/23.
UK’s annual international climate finance (ICF) spending, £m, by financial year for the period 2011/12 to 2022/23. Total spending is indicated by the red line and the blue dotted lines indicate total spending by department. Data from Defra for 2022/23 is not included as this department declined Carbon Brief’s FOI request for that year. Source: UK government data obtained by FOI.

Three government departments have been responsible for the UK’s climate-finance projects, although they have shifted titles and responsibilities several times over the past decade.

The majority of projects – 65% of the total funding across 417 projects – have been handled by DFID and, since September 2020, FCDO, which replaced it when the department was rolled into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The second largest portion – 32% of total funding across 46 projects – has been overseen by the energy department, which has been known as the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and, since February 2023, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

The remaining 3% has been handled by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) across 27 projects. (Unlike the other departments, which released “provisional” data for 2022/23 to Carbon Brief, Defra declined to share data for this year.)

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Where is UK climate finance being spent?

The map below shows where the UK has directed single-country funds since 2011 and the total spending in these nations across the 11-year period.

Countries in shades of blue have received climate finance from the UK and those in orange would be eligible to receive it, but have not. (Those in grey are not eligible to receive aid.)

Total country-specific ICF spending, 2011/12-2022/23.
Total country-specific ICF spending, 2011/12-2022/23. Source: UK government data obtained by freedom of information (FOI) request. The designations employed and the presentation of the material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Source: UK government data obtained by FOI.

Many factors contribute to which countries receive ICF funds from the UK, including vulnerability to climate change, regional expertise and diplomatic ties.

“It is aid money that is subject to the whim of the donor, who will naturally be funding what is aligned to its national interest – some would argue rightly so,” Faten Aggad, a climate diplomacy expert and adjunct professor at the University of Cape Town tells Carbon Brief.

Of the 37 nations and territories that have received single-country funds, 17 are members of the Commonwealth – a group primarily made up of former British Empire colonies. A further two recipients, St Helena and Montserrat, remain British overseas territories.

Eighteen of the recipients are “least developed countries” (LDCs) – a UN grouping of 46 predominantly African states that are entitled to preferential access to aid. Only three recipients are independent small-island territories – Dominica, Haiti and Fiji.

Ethiopia is, by far, the biggest recipient of single-country funds, with £377.5m in total.

Most of this money has been provided through two sizable programmes aimed at increasing the Ethiopian government’s resilience to humanitarian shocks and increasing food security.

Case study: Productive Safety Net Programme

Location: Ethiopia

ICF spend: £190.8m between 2015/16 and 2019/2020

A social safety net programme – one of the largest in Africa – launched by the Ethiopian government and a group of donors in 2005 to help food-insecure households. It involved handing out food and cash either in exchange for labour on public works projects or unconditionally, for those who cannot work. The UK classed part of its contribution as climate finance because the public works being built include climate-proofing local infrastructure and the rehabilitation of habitats such as shrubland, which it says will absorb carbon dioxide (CO2). Boosting people’s food security also helped to “build resilience to climate shocks”. Money has been provided both directly to the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation and to the World Bank, which also supports the project.

Several major recipients are emerging economies, which often have high emissions and are relatively wealthy. 

According to the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), these funds are often provided as loans, with the aim of attracting private investment and potentially creating opportunities for UK firms.

India has seen a dramatic increase in single-country funding. Carbon Brief’s previous analysis in 2017 showed that the UK had spent a total of £5m of ICF there, but now, largely thanks to a new , the total has risen to £144.8m.

Clare Shakya, a climate finance expert at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), tells Carbon Brief:

“The UK’s development finance has traditionally been focused on those countries that most need support from among Britain’s ex-colonies, such as Bangladesh, Uganda and Kenya, and those which hold a strategic interest for the UK, such as Ethiopia, India or Nepal. The current government has been expanding the countries that it partners with on development, largely on the basis of strategic interest.”

As the chart below shows, only £2.55bn has been handed out as direct, single-country funds. The remainder is spent either through regional funds or even more broadly on “developing countries” in general. 

Case study: Supporting structural reform in the Indian power sector

Location: India

ICF spend: £13.1m between 2017/18 and 2022/23

This project aims to improve the reliability of electricity supply in India through power-sector reform. It worked alongside a decentralised renewables programme also funded by the UK. In line with the government’s approach to providing aid to India, this project aimed to assist through “world-class” expertise, “not through traditional grant support”. The consultancy KPMGwas hired to provide “technical assistance” to the Indian Ministry of Power and other agencies. Other organisations are also brought into the project. The Shell Foundation – a charitable initiative of the oil company – was hired to promote the employment of women in the energy sector. The Behavioural Insights Team, originally set up by the UK government and dubbed “the nudge unit”, was also employed to apply behavioural insights to the Indian power sector and “influence customer behaviour”.

This is because most ICF is channelled through multilateral development banks, large consultancies and other organisations that ultimately decide how the money will be spent, although often with oversight from the UK and other contributors. (See: Who is the UK paying to run these projects?)

Shares of total ICF spending, 2011/12-2022/23, that have gone to projects that will benefit “developing countries” or regions (blue) compared to those that are targeted at specific countries (red).
Shares of total ICF spending, 2011/12-2022/23, that have gone to projects that will benefit “developing countries” or regions (blue) compared to those that are targeted at specific countries (red). This excludes the small number of projects where the target country or region was not identified. Source: UK government data obtained by FOI.

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What results has this climate finance produced?

Each year, the UK government publishes a report laying out the impact its climate finance has had and its progress towards a selection of key performance indicators (KPIs). This includes the additional finance that its ICF funds has “mobilised”.

“Mobilised” refers to money from private sources – such as banks and companies – or from external public sources – such as UN bodies, development banks and the governments of recipient countries – which has been spent on climate action due to initial investment using ICF aid money.

These figures are important, not least because the annual $100bn (£80bn) goal that developed countries have promised to meet includes “mobilising” such additional sources.

The chart below shows how, according to the government’s reporting on its KPIs, these climate-finance sources have grown between 2014 and 2023. Combined with ICF spending, they bring the UK’s cumulative total to £26.49bn by 2023. (The government notes that only 297 projects have reported this additional impact, so the real total could be larger.)

Case study: UK Caribbean Infrastructure Fund

Location: Caribbean

ICF spend: £69.5m between 2016/17 and 2022/23

As part of a “major re-engagement between the UK and the Caribbean” in 2015, this fund was launched to build “climate-resilient” infrastructure in eight Commonwealth Caribbean nations and Montserrat, a UK overseas territory. It was given a boost in 2018 to support reconstruction in Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda, after hurricanes Irma and Maria tore through the region.The fund is run largely by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), a multilateral institution based in Barbados, with small team of UK government staff to support its delivery.

UK’s cumulative ICF spending, public finance mobilised and private finance mobilised, £bn, by financial year for the period 2014/15 to 2021/22.
UK’s cumulative ICF spending, public finance mobilised and private finance mobilised, £bn, by financial year for the period 2014/15 to 2021/22. Source: UK government data obtained by FOI, UK ICF results reports 2015-2022.

Beyond additional financing, the government also has a range of additional KPIs. The most recent report on their progress includes cumulative data up to 2022/23.

The table below shows progress on these indicators between 2014/15 and 2022/23.

Among other things, the government states that its ICF spending has “supported” nearly 102 million people to deal with the impacts of climate change and “reduced or avoided” 87m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e).

As of 2023, the UK has doubled its list of KPIs to include new metrics such as the number of social institutions with improved access to clean energy and area of deforestation avoided.

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Methodology

This analysis is based on a full dataset of ongoing and closed ICF projects, between 2011/12 and 2022/23, that Carbon Brief has assembled using FOI data and data extracted from government web pages.

The government’s Development Tracker website provides information on all of the development aid projects that the UK has spent money on, divided up among the departments that administer them. It includes data on the total budget of each project, but it does not include the breakdown of how much money in each budget is specifically set aside to address climate change.

Similarly, while the UK’s submissions to the UN include data on “climate-specific” finance, it does not consistently include sufficient information to identify all of the projects and only go as far as 2020.

To obtain this data, Carbon Brief sent FOI requests on 17 March 2023 to the three government departments responsible for ICF projects – FCDO, Defra and DESNZ. These requests asked for project-level annual ICF spend for the period 2017/18 to 2022/23 and the project ID code for each project.

The data was provided by all three departments towards the end of May. FCDO and DESNZ provided figures for 2022/23, noting that they are “provisional”. Defra, which accounts for only around 3% of total ICF spend, declined to provide these figures as it said the department was “yet to finalise” them.

This was then combined with annual ICF data for the period 2011/12 to 2016/17, which Carbon Brief had obtained in 2017 with another FOI request. This was achieved using the project codes to match up projects that had continued across these two periods. Further information, such as project names, descriptions and start/end dates, was then added using data scraped from ICF-tagged Development Tracker pages in June 2023 – again using project codes to match up projects. Data was extracted by Carbon Brief’s Tom Prater using Import.io and Octoparse.

The dataset can be viewed in this read-only Google Sheet, which includes an annual breakdown of spending. There are a few points to consider when exploring this data:

  • A handful of projects had changed names, changed project IDs or moved to different departments. Carbon Brief matched up these projects with the correct details as far as possible, checking on specific details with the relevant departments.
  • There remain 16 projects where no Development Tracker pages could be identified and, therefore, some information is missing (four of these include work in Afghanistan, so might have been removed for security reasons). This does not include COP26 costs and R&I funds, which do not have Development Tracker pages.
  • For 10 of those projects, amounting to £13.27m in funds, a project location could not be identified and this will have a small effect on the country analysis. “COP costs”, which amount to £99m, also do not have a location.
  • Some lines show negative spending. This can occur for several reasons, including a case where an investment funded through ICF has brought in returns, or if ICF spend has been incorrectly recorded and corrected, following quality assurance.
  • The total number of ICF projects is higher than the number recorded on the government’s Development Tracker website, due to the FOI responses including a more comprehensive list of projects.

There are also issues with a number of Development Tracker pages, with many showing incorrect details at the time of publication and some of the links to project pages breaking.

This would not impact the ICF totals quoted in the article, which are derived from FOI requests, but may result in discrepancies when comparing the data included in the interactive table with project pages. The government has confirmed to Carbon Brief that it is aware of these issues.

The post Analysis: How the UK has spent its foreign aid on climate change since 2011 appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Analysis: How the UK has spent its foreign aid on climate change since 2011

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Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges

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The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges

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Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total

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Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.

Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.

The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.

In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.

In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.

Total annual fuel cost savings from the UK’s fleet of battery EVs, plug-in hybrids and electric vans, £bn. Figures for 2026 based on EVs on the road as of May 2026 and the latest road fuel prices. Analysis based on 80% home charging at cheap overnight rates and 20% public charging. Savings can reach £1,400 a year with exclusive home charging. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.

Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.

The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.

It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.

According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.

The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.

The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.

The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.

The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.

When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.

It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.

In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.

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Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total

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UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns

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Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.

The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.

But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.

Project continued after military coup

Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.

The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.

    The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.

    CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.

    Conflict prevents on the ground verification

    The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.

    The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.

    TAK, THAILAND – JANUARY 01: Internally displaced people (IDP) from Myanmar carrying bags of donated supplies from Thailand while crossing the Moei river as seen from behind a fence with razor wire on the river bank in Mae Sot, a district at the Thai-Myanmar border on new year on January 1, 2022 in Tak, Thailand. (Photo by Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images)

    TAK, THAILAND – JANUARY 01: Internally displaced people (IDP) from Myanmar carrying bags of donated supplies from Thailand while crossing the Moei river as seen from behind a fence with razor wire on the river bank in Mae Sot, a district at the Thai-Myanmar border on new year on January 1, 2022 in Tak, Thailand. (Photo by Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images)

    Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.

    But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.

    “Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”

    “Exceptional circumstances”

    CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.

    The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.

    A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.

    Contested methodology

    Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.

    The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.

    EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says

    After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.

    “The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.

    Too many credits issued

    But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.

    The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.

    Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.

    CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.

    The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.

    Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.

    “Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.

    The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.

    UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns

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