Nearly a tenth of global climate finance could be under threat as US president Donald Trump’s aid cuts risk wiping out huge swathes of spending overseas, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Last year, the US announced that it had increased its climate aid for developing countries roughly seven-fold over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, reaching $11bn per year.
This likely amounts to more than 8% of all international climate finance in 2024.
However, any progress in US climate finance has been thrown into disarray by the new administration.
Trump has halted US foreign aid and threatened to cancel virtually all US Agency for International Development (USAid) projects, with climate funds identified as a prime target.
USAid has provided around a third of US climate finance in recent years, reaching nearly $3bn in 2023, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Another $4bn of US funding for the UN Green Climate Fund (GCF) has also been cancelled by the president’s administration.
One expert tells Carbon Brief that more climate funds will likely end up on the “cutting block”.
Another warns of an “enormous gulf” to meeting the new global $300bn climate-finance goal nations agreed last year, if the US stops reporting – let alone providing – any official climate finance.
Carbon Brief’s analysis draws together available data to explain how the Trump administration’s cuts endanger global efforts to help developing countries tackle climate change.
- How much did climate finance increase under Biden?
- What are the climate impacts of cutting USAid?
- Are other sources of climate finance at risk?
- Methodology
How much did climate finance increase under Biden?
The US is by far the world’s largest economy and biggest historical emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2).
This means that, while it is the fourth-biggest national provider of international climate finance, its overall share is low relative to the nation’s wealth and responsibility for climate change. As a result, the US has long been seen as a laggard in this area.
The US provides 0.24% of its gross national income (GNI) as aid for developing countries, which includes some climate funding. This is the same share as the Czech Republic, a nation with a per-capita GNI three times smaller.
US climate-finance contributions stalled during Trump’s first four-year term as president, when other developed countries were ramping up to meet their target of providing and mobilising $100bn a year for developing countries by 2020.
A shift in focus came when Biden became president in 2021. He established an international climate finance plan to scale up US efforts, in line with US obligations under the Paris Agreement.
Biden also announced that the US would reach $11.4bn in annual climate finance by 2024.
This goal was achieved, according to “preliminary estimates” announced by the US during the COP29 climate summit at the end of 2024. These estimates, which are unlikely to be confirmed by the new administration, are shown in the chart below.
The figures are based predominantly on “bilateral” climate finance reported to the UN. They also include US finance distributed via multilateral climate funds, such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the GCF.
Bilateral climate finance largely comes from aid programmes with climate benefits, such as supporting a geothermal project in the Philippines, investing in “climate-smart” agriculture in Bangladesh, or improving water security in Niger.
The US significantly increased its contribution towards climate finance during the Biden administration. Ramping up relevant US aid projects and multilateral funding helped developed countries to hit the $100bn climate-finance target – albeit two years late in 2022.
The $11bn reported by the US in 2024 would be the equivalent of 21% of all bilateral and multilateral climate fund inputs that year – up from around 4% under the previous Trump presidency. These funds are shown by the blue bars in the figure below.
(Estimates for 2023 and 2024 assume a steady rise in climate finance from sources beyond the US, as official figures beyond then have not been released. See Methodology for more information.)
Even when considering other sources of international climate finance – specifically multilateral development banks (MDBs) and “mobilised” private finance shown in grey in the figure below – the US has contributed a sizable share in recent years.
After lingering around 2% during the last Trump administration, the US share of total climate finance roughly quadrupled to more than 8% in 2024, Carbon Brief analysis suggests.
It is also worth noting that the US, as the biggest shareholder at the World Bank and a major shareholder at other MDBs, can be linked to a large portion of their finance. This contribution is not factored into official US reporting, so it has not been included in this analysis.
Even accounting for MDB contributions, US climate finance spending is still far lower than its “fair share”, based on its historical responsibility for climate change and ability to pay. Some analysts have put the US fair share as high as 40-50% of climate finance overall.
What are the climate impacts of cutting USAid?
Upon taking office for the second time in January 2025, Trump immediately took aim at international aid spending and climate action with a flurry of executive orders.
One order announced plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement and criticised such treaties for “steer[ing] American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance”. It also “revoked and rescinded” Biden’s international climate finance plan.
In another executive order, Trump announced a “pause” on US foreign aid “for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with US foreign policy”.
USAid handles 60% of US foreign aid – more than $43bn in 2023 – while the State Department oversees most of the remainder. Trump says he wants to “close [USAid] down” and his advisor Elon Musk has called it a “criminal organisation”.
Source: Truth Social.
Trump requires the approval of Congress to repurpose USAid funds or, indeed, abolish the agency. His administration’s actions have, therefore, been described as “illegal” and “unconstitutional” by senior Democrats and aid workers.
Yet, despite lawsuits and court orders instructing the administration to lift the pause, it has since stated its intention to eliminate more than 90% of USAid contracts and, more widely, $60bn of US foreign aid.
This would have major implications for US climate finance.
News outlets have reported on the climate-related programmes at risk, sometimes stating that USAid has funded half a billion dollars of climate programmes annually in recent years.
This figure, while based on USAid’s own reporting of its clean energy, climate adaptation and nature projects, is a significant underestimate of its total climate-finance contributions.
Carbon Brief analysis suggests that USAid contributed $2.8bn of climate finance in 2023, the latest year for which data is available. Other US departments with aid contributions in the OECD database contributed smaller sums, bringing total climate spending up to $2.9bn.
This equates to around a third of US climate finance that year. If a similar share from these departments was counted as climate finance in 2024, it would amount to nearly $4bn, Carbon Brief finds.
(These are estimates based on “climate-related” aid data reported to the OECD. See Methodology for more details.)
Climate-finance experts tell Carbon Brief that these higher figures align with the fact that many aid projects targeting other issues, such as agriculture, have climate components.
Dr Ed Carr, a centre director at Stockholm Environment Institute US who has previously worked at USAid, tells Carbon Brief:
“The way that the Biden administration was doing stuff and the way that [former president Barack] Obama before was doing stuff, [was to] start to weave a degree of climate sensitivity into everything…So, basically, a huge percentage of programmes [are] working on some aspect of climate.”
Unlike many forms of climate finance, USAid projects include lots of grant-based funding, which many developing countries view as preferable to loans and better suited to supporting climate adaptation.
Relevant projects backed by USAid in recent years include support for a food-security programme in Ethiopia, upgrading a dam in Pakistan and protecting water supplies in Peru.
The Trump administration has made it clear that “climate” is one of the issues that it is scrutinising as it assesses aid projects for consistency with what it defines as US interests. A survey sent to grant recipients several weeks after the initial executive order asks:
“Can you confirm this is not a climate or ‘environmental justice’ project or include such elements?”
Are other sources of climate finance at risk?
The remaining billions in climate finance are handled by more than a dozen organisations, distributing grants, loans, development finance and export credits.
Around $1.2bn of US climate finance in 2022 was paid into international funds, including the GEF. This amounts to a fifth of the total US climate finance that year.
The Biden administration did not release a breakdown of how much money went to these funds in 2023 and 2024. However, in 2023 the country paid out $1bn for the GCF alone.
Such funding is also at risk as the new administration pulls away from what the White House calls “international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values”. Notably, the US has now cancelled $4bn in funds previously committed to the GCF.
(Biden and Obama pledged $3bn each to the fund. However, neither of them ever delivered more than $1bn of their pledge, leaving $4bn outstanding.)
As the chart below shows, this means the US contribution to the GCF is now lower than that of Sweden – a country with an economy 50 times smaller.
The GCF is not the only specific fund that has been targeted. The US formally ended its involvement in the UN loss and damage fund, which it pledged $17.6m towards in 2023. It has also withdrawn from the Just Energy Transition Partnership initiative, which included at least $56m in grants to help South Africa transition away from coal power.
Another Trump executive order announced a review of “international intergovernmental organisation” membership, including MDBs.
There is an assumption that the US will not give up its considerable power in these banks. However, Trump supporters, including those behind the influential Project 2025, have laid out plans for withdrawing the US from the World Bank.
A large chunk of the remaining US climate finance in recent years has come from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which committed more than $3.7bn in climate finance in 2024 and a similar amount in 2023. This included loans for a wind power project in Mozambique and a railway to carry critical minerals through Angola.
DFC is a development finance institution that invests in private enterprises and was set up under the first Trump administration. It has so far been insulated from US aid cuts and there has been speculation that it may now play a larger role in US foreign policy.
Leaning more heavily on DFC, as well as the US Export-Import Bank (EXIM), would not be suitable for climate finance, Ritu Bharadwaj, a climate-finance principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), tells Carbon Brief:
“If these mechanisms remain intact while grant-based finance is gutted, it signals a shift away from public, needs-based funding toward finance that prioritises US commercial and strategic interests. In other words, what little climate finance remains will likely benefit US corporations first, rather than frontline communities.”
Additionally, even if such organisations are favoured by the new administration, this does not mean their climate projects will be protected. Benjamin Black, Trump’s nominee to lead DFC, wrote a blog post about the corporation in January, stating:
“The Biden administration’s emphasis on virtue-signaling – such as dedicating 40% of [DFC’s] recent commitments to green projects – raises serious concerns.”
Carr tells Carbon Brief that more US climate spending could still end up on the “cutting block”:
“From what we’ve seen so far, it looks to me like they are going to try and root out everything that they see as clearly related to climate.”
He caveats this by noting that some of the money the Biden administration would have counted as climate finance may continue, but not be defined as such.
This highlights the importance of accounting when assessing climate finance. Different governments around the world report different things as climate finance, depending on their priorities and political leanings.
For example, during the last Trump presidency, the US stopped reporting on climate finance to the UN. When calculating progress towards the $100bn goal during this period, the OECD had to estimate US figures based on “provisional data” or averages from previous years.
The Biden administration retrospectively reported the missing data from the Trump years in 2021, resulting in the OECD scaling down a previous estimate.
Clemence Landers, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) who previously worked at the US Treasury, tells Carbon Brief that a “very educated guess [is] that there will be no reporting from the US” in the coming years.
The US government website tracking aid has not been updated since December.
If climate finance is not recorded, this could hamper its inclusion in the annual $100bn goal, which lasts until 2025, as well as the $300bn goal that countries agreed on last year at COP29 to replace it, as Landers notes:
“That does leave an enormous gulf in terms of the new global climate-finance target.”
Methodology
Climate-finance reporting practices mean that official data can be difficult to analyse in detail.
In this article, annual US climate-finance figures for the period 2015-2022 are based on those reported by the US government to the UN in biennial reports (BRs) and, for the years 2021 and 2022, its first biennial transparency report (BTR).
These can be considered “official” climate-finance figures. They align with the figures that the US federal government has released and are the ones used to inform the OECD’s assessments of developed countries’ progress towards the $100bn annual target.
The figures only include bilateral climate finance and inputs into multilateral climate funds. MDB shares and private finance mobilised are not covered. Again, this aligns with the “climate-finance” totals quoted in progress reports by the Biden administration.
The climate-finance totals for 2023 and 2024 are based on releases from the US Department of State during the Biden administration. These figures are for the US financial year (FY), which runs from 1 October to 30 September. However, the FY figures are the same as the calendar year numbers reported to the UN for 2021 and 2022, so Carbon Brief assumes the same is true for 2023 and 2024.
Due to the significant time lag in official reporting to the UN, the figures underpinning these totals are not due to be released until 2026. (The previous Trump administration did not report them at all and it is unlikely that the current one will either, now that the US has announced its departure from the Paris Agreement.)
Given this time lag, estimates for total international climate finance in 2023 and 2024 are derived from a joint analysis by the thinktanks Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ODI, Germanwatch and ECCO. This calculated likely totals in 2030, based on existing pledges and planned reforms. Carbon Brief assumes a steady trajectory to the overall $197bn estimated under the thinktanks’ “business-as-usual” scenario, with bilateral finance, specifically, reaching $50bn by 2025.
Climate-finance figures reported to the UN by the US do not include details of the government departments and agencies responsible, making it difficult to determine the share overseen by USAid. The Biden administration also did not report the breakdown between agencies.
This data is reported to the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS), which contains figures up to 2023. However, the information in the CRS is not “official” climate finance, but rather “climate-related development finance”, identified as such using Rio Markers. Most countries apply simple coefficients to convert the figures they report to the CRS into their climate-finance submissions to the UN, but the US calculates its climate-finance submissions separately.
Nevertheless, to obtain approximate figures, Carbon Brief has assumed that 100% of CRS projects marked as “principal” climate projects and 50% of the projects marked as “significant”, are climate finance. This aligns with a methodology used by other organisations, such as Oxfam, as well as other nations, including Germany, Japan and Denmark.
However, it is only a rough estimate. Experts that Carbon Brief consulted stressed the uncertainties of climate finance reporting and said the numbers could be higher or lower.
The post Analysis: Nearly a tenth of global climate finance threatened by Trump aid cuts appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Nearly a tenth of global climate finance threatened by Trump aid cuts
Climate Change
DeBriefed 15 August 2025: Raging wildfires; Xi’s priorities; Factchecking the Trump climate report
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Blazing heat hits Europe
FANNING THE FLAMES: Wildfires “fanned by a heatwave and strong winds” caused havoc across southern Europe, Reuters reported. It added: “Fire has affected nearly 440,000 hectares (1,700 square miles) in the eurozone so far in 2025, double the average for the same period of the year since 2006.” Extreme heat is “breaking temperature records across Europe”, the Guardian said, with several countries reporting readings of around 40C.
HUMAN TOLL: At least three people have died in the wildfires erupting across Spain, Turkey and Albania, France24 said, adding that the fires have “displaced thousands in Greece and Albania”. Le Monde reported that a child in Italy “died of heatstroke”, while thousands were evacuated from Spain and firefighters “battled three large wildfires” in Portugal.
UK WILDFIRE RISK: The UK saw temperatures as high as 33.4C this week as England “entered its fourth heatwave”, BBC News said. The high heat is causing “nationally significant” water shortfalls, it added, “hitting farms, damaging wildlife and increasing wildfires”. The Daily Mirror noted that these conditions “could last until mid-autumn”. Scientists warn the UK faces possible “firewaves” due to climate change, BBC News also reported.
Around the world
- GRID PRESSURES: Iraq suffered a “near nationwide blackout” as elevated power demand – due to extreme temperatures of around 50C – triggered a transmission line failure, Bloomberg reported.
- ‘DIRE’ DOWN UNDER: The Australian government is keeping a climate risk assessment that contains “dire” implications for the continent “under wraps”, the Australian Financial Review said.
- EXTREME RAINFALL: Mexico City is “seeing one of its heaviest rainy seasons in years”, the Washington Post said. Downpours in the Japanese island of Kyushu “caused flooding and mudslides”, according to Politico. In Kashmir, flash floods killed 56 and left “scores missing”, the Associated Press said.
- SOUTH-SOUTH COOPERATION: China and Brazil agreed to “ensure the success” of COP30 in a recent phone call, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.
- PLASTIC ‘DEADLOCK’: Talks on a plastic pollution treaty have failed again at a summit in Geneva, according to the Guardian, with countries “deadlocked” on whether it should include “curbs on production and toxic chemicals”.
15
The number of times by which the most ethnically-diverse areas in England are more likely to experience extreme heat than its “least diverse” areas, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- As many as 13 minerals critical for low-carbon energy may face shortages under 2C pathways | Nature Climate Change
- A “scoping review” examined the impact of climate change on poor sexual and reproductive health and rights in sub-Saharan Africa | PLOS One
- A UK university cut the carbon footprint of its weekly canteen menu by 31% “without students noticing” | Nature Food
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Factchecking Trump’s climate report
A report commissioned by the US government to justify rolling back climate regulations contains “at least 100 false or misleading statements”, according to a Carbon Brief factcheck involving dozens of leading climate scientists. The report, compiled in two months by five hand-picked researchers, inaccurately claims that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed” and misleadingly states that “excessively aggressive [emissions] mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial”80
Spotlight
Does Xi Jinping care about climate change?
This week, Carbon Brief unpacks new research on Chinese president Xi Jinping’s policy priorities.
On this day in 2005, Xi Jinping, a local official in eastern China, made an unplanned speech when touring a small village – a rare occurrence in China’s highly-choreographed political culture.
In it, he observed that “lucid waters and lush mountains are mountains of silver and gold” – that is, the environment cannot be sacrificed for the sake of growth.
(The full text of the speech is not available, although Xi discussed the concept in a brief newspaper column – see below – a few days later.)
In a time where most government officials were laser-focused on delivering economic growth, this message was highly unusual.
Forward-thinking on environment
As a local official in the early 2000s, Xi endorsed the concept of “green GDP”, which integrates the value of natural resources and the environment into GDP calculations.
He also penned a regular newspaper column, 22 of which discussed environmental protection – although “climate change” was never mentioned.
This focus carried over to China’s national agenda when Xi became president.
New research from the Asia Society Policy Institute tracked policies in which Xi is reported by state media to have “personally” taken action.
It found that environmental protection is one of six topics in which he is often said to have directly steered policymaking.
Such policies include guidelines to build a “Beautiful China”, the creation of an environmental protection inspection team and the “three-north shelterbelt” afforestation programme.
“It’s important to know what Xi’s priorities are because the top leader wields outsized influence in the Chinese political system,” Neil Thomas, Asia Society Policy Institute fellow and report co-author, told Carbon Brief.
Local policymakers are “more likely” to invest resources in addressing policies they know have Xi’s attention, to increase their chances for promotion, he added.
What about climate and energy?
However, the research noted, climate and energy policies have not been publicised as bearing Xi’s personal touch.
“I think Xi prioritises environmental protection more than climate change because reducing pollution is an issue of social stability,” Thomas said, noting that “smoggy skies and polluted rivers” were more visible and more likely to trigger civil society pushback than gradual temperature increases.
The paper also said topics might not be linked to Xi personally when they are “too technical” or “politically sensitive”.
For example, Xi’s landmark decision for China to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 is widely reported as having only been made after climate modelling – facilitated by former climate envoy Xie Zhenhua – showed that this goal was achievable.
Prior to this, Xi had never spoken publicly about carbon neutrality.
Prof Alex Wang, a University of California, Los Angeles professor of law not involved in the research, noted that emphasising Xi’s personal attention may signal “top” political priorities, but not necessarily Xi’s “personal interests”.
By not emphasising climate, he said, Xi may be trying to avoid “pushing the system to overprioritise climate to the exclusion of the other priorities”.
There are other ways to know where climate ranks on the policy agenda, Thomas noted:
“Climate watchers should look at what Xi says, what Xi does and what policies Xi authorises in the name of the ‘central committee’. Is Xi talking more about climate? Is Xi establishing institutions and convening meetings that focus on climate? Is climate becoming a more prominent theme in top-level documents?”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP EFFECT: The Columbia Energy Exchange podcast examined how pressure from US tariffs could affect India’s clean energy transition.
NAMIBIAN ‘DESTRUCTION’: The National Observer investigated the failure to address “human rights abuses and environmental destruction” claims against a Canadian oil company in Namibia.
‘RED AI’: The Network for the Digital Economy and the Environment studied the state of current research on “Red AI”, or the “negative environmental implications of AI”.
Coming up
- 17 August: Bolivian general elections
- 18-29 August: Preparatory talks on the entry into force of the “High Seas Treaty”, New York
- 18-22 August: Y20 Summit, Johannesburg
- 21 August: Advancing the “Africa clean air programme” through Africa-Asia collaboration, Yokohama
Pick of the jobs
- Lancaster Environment Centre, senior research associate: JUST Centre | Salary: £39,355-£45,413. Location: Lancaster, UK
- Environmental Justice Foundation, communications and media officer, Francophone Africa | Salary: XOF600,000-XOF800,000. Location: Dakar, Senegal
- Politico, energy & climate editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels, Belgium
- EnviroCatalysts, meteorologist | Salary: Unknown. Location: New Delhi, India
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 15 August 2025: Raging wildfires; Xi’s priorities; Factchecking the Trump climate report appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 15 August 2025: Raging wildfires; Xi’s priorities; Factchecking the Trump climate report
Climate Change
New York Already Denied Permits to These Gas Pipelines. Under Trump, They Could Get Greenlit
The specter of a “gas-for-wind” compromise between the governor and the White House is drawing the ire of residents as a deadline looms.
Hundreds of New Yorkers rallied against new natural gas pipelines in their state as a deadline loomed for the public to comment on a revived proposal to expand the gas pipeline that supplies downstate New York.
New York Already Denied Permits to These Gas Pipelines. Under Trump, They Could Get Greenlit
A “critical assessment” report commissioned by the Trump administration to justify a rollback of US climate regulations contains at least 100 false or misleading statements, according to a Carbon Brief factcheck involving dozens of leading climate scientists.
The report – “A critical review of impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the US climate” – was published by the US Department of Energy (DoE) on 23 July, just days before the government laid out plans to revoke a scientific finding used as the legal basis for emissions regulation.
The executive summary of the controversial report inaccurately claims that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed”.
It also states misleadingly that “excessively aggressive [emissions] mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial”.
Compiled in just two months by five “independent” researchers hand-selected by the climate-sceptic US secretary of energy Chris Wright, the document has sparked fierce criticism from climate scientists, who have pointed to factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.
Experts have also noted the authors’ track record of promoting views at odds with the mainstream understanding of climate science.
Wright’s department claims the report – which is currently open to public comment as part of a 30-day review – underwent an “internal peer-review period amongst [the] DoE’s scientific research community”.
The report is designed to provide a scientific underpinning to one flank of the Trump administration’s plans to rescind a finding that serves as the legal prerequisite for federal emissions regulation. (The second flank is about legal authority to regulate emissions.)
The “endangerment finding” – enacted by the Obama administration in 2009 – states that six greenhouse gases are contributing to the net-negative impacts of climate change and, thus, put the public in danger.
In a press release on 29 July, the US Environmental Protection Agency said “updated studies and information” set out in the new report would “challenge the assumptions” of the 2009 finding.
Carbon Brief asked a wide range of climate scientists, including those cited in the “critical review” itself, to factcheck the report’s various claims and statements.
The post Factcheck: Trump’s climate report includes more than 100 false or misleading claims appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-trumps-climate-report-includes-more-than-100-false-or-misleading-claims/
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