Developed countries have poured billions of dollars into railways across Asia, solar projects in Africa and thousands of other climate-related initiatives overseas, according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
A group of nations, including much of Europe, the US and Japan, is obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide international “climate finance” to developing countries.
This financial support can come in forms such as grants and loans from various sources, including aid budgets, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private investments.
The flagship climate-finance target for more than a decade was to hit “$100bn a year” by 2020, which developed countries met – albeit two years late – in 2022.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have analysed data across more than 20,000 global climate projects funded using public money from developed nations, including official 2021 and 2022 figures, which have only just been published.
The data provides a detailed insight into how the $100bn goal was reached, including funding for everything from sustainable farming in Niger to electricity projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
With developed countries now pledging to ramp up climate finance further, the analysis also shows how donors often rely on loans and private finance to meet their obligations.
- The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
- Relatively wealthy countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
- A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
- There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
- Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
- US shares in development banks significantly inflated its total contribution
- Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
- Methodology
The $100bn target was reached in 2022, boosted by private finance and the US
A small handful of countries have consistently been the top climate-finance donors. This remained the case in 2021 and 2022, with just four countries – Japan, Germany, France and the US – responsible for half of all climate finance, the analysis shows.
Not only was 2022 the first year in which the $100bn goal was achieved, it also saw the largest ever single-year increase in climate finance – a rise of $26.3bn, or 29%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
(It is worth noting that while OECD figures are often referenced as the most “official” climate-finance totals, they are contested.)
Half of this increase came from a $12.6bn rise in support from MDBs – financial institutions that are owned and funded by member states. The rest can be attributed to two main factors.
First, while several donors ramped up spending, the US drove by far the biggest increase in “bilateral” finance, provided directly by the country itself.
After years of stalling during the first Donald Trump presidency, when Joe Biden took office in 2021, the nation’s bilateral climate aid more than tripled between that year and the next.
Meanwhile, after years of “stagnating” at around $15bn, the amount of private investments “mobilised” in developing countries by developed-country spending surged to around $22bn in 2022, according to OECD estimates.
As the chart below shows, the combination of increased US contributions and higher private investments pushed climate finance up by nearly $14bn in 2022, helping it to reach $115.9bn in total.
Both of these trends are still pertinent in 2025, following a new pledge made at COP29 by developed countries to ramp up climate finance to “at least” $300bn a year by 2035.
After years of increasing rapidly under Biden, US bilateral climate finance for developing countries has been effectively eliminated during Trump’s second presidential term. Other major donors, including Germany, France and the UK, have also cut their aid budgets.
This means there will be more pressure on other sources of climate finance in the coming years. In particular, developed countries hope that private finance can help to raise finance into the trillions of dollars required to achieve developing countries’ climate goals.
Some higher-income countries – including China and the UAE – were major recipients
The greatest beneficiaries of international climate finance tend to be large, middle-income countries, such as Egypt, the Philippines and Brazil, according to the analysis.
(The World Bank classifies countries as being low-, lower-middle, upper-middle or high-income, according to their gross national income per person.)
Lower-middle income India received $14.1bn in 2021 and 2022 – nearly all as loans – making it by far the largest recipient, as the chart below shows.
Most of India’s top projects were metro and rail lines in cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, which accounted for 46% of its total climate finance in those years, Carbon Brief analysis shows. (See: A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects.)
As the world’s second-largest economy and a major funder of energy projects overseas, China – classified as upper-middle income by the World Bank – has faced mounting pressure to start officially providing climate finance. At the same time, the nation received more than $3bn of climate finance over this period, as it is still classed as a developing country under the UN climate system.
High-income Gulf petrostates are also among the countries receiving funds. For example, the UAE received Japanese finance of $1.3bn for an electricity transmission project and a waste-to-energy project.
To some extent, such large shares simply reflect the size of many middle-income countries. India received 9% of all bilateral and multilateral climate finance, but it is home to 18% of the global population.
The focus on these nations also reflects the kind of big-budget infrastructure that is being funded.
“Middle-income economies tend to have the financial and institutional capacity to design, appraise and deliver large-scale projects,” Sarah Colenbrander, climate programme director at global affairs thinktank ODI, tells Carbon Brief.
Donors might focus on relatively higher-income or powerful nations out of self-interest, for example, to align with geopolitical, trade or commercial interests. But, as Colenbrander tells Carbon Brief, there are also plenty of “high-minded” reasons to do so, not least the opportunity to help curb their relatively high emissions.
A tenth of all direct climate finance went to Japan-backed rail projects
Japan is the largest climate-finance donor, accounting for a fifth of all bilateral and multilateral finance in 2021 and 2022, the analysis shows.
Of the 20 largest bilateral projects, 13 were Japanese. These include $7.6bn of loans for eight rail and metro systems in major cities across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
In fact, Japan’s funding for rail projects was so substantial that it made up 11% of all bilateral finance. This amounts to 4% of climate finance from all sources.
While these rail projects are likely to provide benefits to developing countries, they also highlight some of the issues identified by aid experts with Japan’s climate-finance practices.
As was the case for more than 80% of Japan’s climate finance, all of these projects were funded with loans, which must be paid back. Nearly a fifth of Japan’s total loans were described as “non-concessional”, meaning they were offered on terms equivalent to those offered on the open market, rather than at more favourable rates.
Many Japan-backed projects also stipulate that Japanese companies and workers must be hired to work on them, reflecting the government’s policies to “proactively support” and “facilitate” the overseas expansion of Japanese business using aid.
Documents show that rail projects in India and the Philippines were granted on this basis.
This practice can be beneficial, especially in sectors such as rail infrastructure, where Japanese companies have considerable expertise. Yet, analysts have questioned Japan’s approach, which they argue can disproportionately benefit the donor itself.
“Counting these loans as climate finance presents a moral hazard…And such loans tied to Japanese businesses make it worse,” Yuri Onodera, a climate specialist at Friends of the Earth Japan, tells Carbon Brief.
There was funding for more than 500 clean-power projects in African countries
Around 730 million people still lack access to electricity, with roughly 80% of those people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of their climate-finance pledges, donor countries often support renewable projects, transmission lines and other initiatives that can provide clean power to those in need.
Carbon Brief and the Guardian have identified funding for more than 500 clean-power and transmission projects in African countries that lack universal electricity access. In total, these funds amounted to $7.6bn over the two years 2021-22.
Among them was support for Chad’s first-ever solar project, a new hydropower plant in Mozambique and the expansion of electricity grids in Nigeria.
The distribution of funds across the continent – excluding multi-country programmes – can be seen in the map below.
A lack of clear rules about what can be classified as “climate finance” in the UN climate process means donors sometimes include support for fossil fuels – particularly gas power – in their totals.
For example, Japan counted an $18m loan to a Japanese liquified natural gas (LNG) company in Senegal and roughly $1m for gas projects in Tanzania.
However, such funding accounted for a tiny fraction of sub-Saharan Africa’s climate finance overall, amounting to less than 1% of all power-sector funding across the region, based on the projects identified in this analysis.
Some ‘least developed’ countries relied heavily on loans
One of the most persistent criticisms levelled at climate finance by developing-country governments and civil society groups is that so much of it is provided in the form of loans.
While loans are commonly used to fund major projects, they are sometimes offered on unfavourable terms and add to the burden of countries that are already struggling with debt.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has shown that the 44 “least developed countries” (LDCs) spend twice as much servicing debts as they receive in climate finance.
Developed nations pledged $33.4bn in 2021 and 2022 to the 44 LDCs to help them finance climate projects. In total, $17.2bn – more than half of the funding – was provided as loans, primarily from Japan, France and development banks.
The chart below shows how, for a number of LDCs, loans continue to be the main way in which they receive international climate funds.
For example, Angola received $216.7m in loans from France – primarily to support its water infrastructure – and $571.6m in loans from various multilateral institutions, together amounting to nearly all the nation’s climate finance over this period.
Oxfam, which describes developed countries as “unjustly indebting poor countries” via loans, estimates that the “true value” of climate finance in 2022 was $28-35bn, roughly a quarter of the OECD’s estimate. This is largely due to Oxfam discounting much of the value of loans.
However, Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam Germany, tells Carbon Brief that, “generally, LDCs receive loans at better conditions” than they would have been able to secure on the open market, sometimes referred to as “concessional” loans.
US shares in development banks significantly raised its total contribution
The US has been one of the world’s top climate-finance providers, accounting for around 15% of all bilateral and multilateral contributions in 2021 and 2022.
Despite this, US contributions have consistently been viewed as relatively low when considering the nation’s wealth and historical role in driving climate change.
Moreover, much of the climate finance that can be attributed to the US comes from its MDB shareholdings, rather than direct contributions from its aid budget.
These banks are owned by member countries and the US is a dominant shareholder in many of them.
The analysis reveals that around three-quarters of US climate finance provided in 2021-22 came via multilateral sources, particularly the World Bank. (For information on how this analysis attributes multilateral funding to donors, see Methodology.)
Among other major donors – specifically Japan, France and Germany – only a third of their finance was channelled through multilateral institutions. As the chart below shows, multilateral contributions lifted the US from being the fifth-largest donor to the third-largest.
While the Trump administration has cut virtually all overseas climate funding and broadly rejected multilateral institutions, the US has not yet abandoned its influential stake in MDBs.
Prior to COP29 in 2024, only MDB funds that could be attributed to developed country inputs were counted towards the $100bn goal, as part of those nations’ Paris Agreement duties.
However, countries have now agreed that “all climate-related outflows” from MDBs – no matter which donor country they are attributed to – will count towards the new $300bn goal.
This means that, as long as MDBs continue extensively funding climate projects, there will still be a large slice of climate finance that can be attributed to the US, even as it exits the Paris Agreement.
Adaptation finance still lags, but climate-vulnerable countries received more
Under the Paris Agreement, developed countries committed to achieving “a balance between adaptation and mitigation” in their climate finance.
The idea is that, while it is important to focus on mitigation – or cutting emissions – by supporting projects such as clean energy, there is also a need to help developing countries prepare for the threat of climate change.
Generally, adaptation projects are less likely to provide a return on investment and are, therefore, more reliant on grant-based finance.
In practice, a “balance” between adaptation and mitigation has never been reached. Over the period of this analysis, 58% of climate finance was for mitigation, 33% was for adaptation and the remainder was for projects that contributed to both goals.
This reflects a preference for mitigation-based financing via loans among some major donors, particularly Japan and France. Both countries provided just a third of their finance for adaptation projects in 2021 and 2022.
However, among some of the most climate-vulnerable countries – including land-locked parts of Africa and small islands – most funding was for adaptation, as the chart below shows.
Among the projects receiving climate-adaptation funds were those supporting sustainable agriculture in Niger, improving disaster resilience in Micronesia and helping those in Somalia who have been internally displaced by “climate change and food crises”.
Methodology
The joint Guardian and Carbon Brief analysis of climate finance includes the bilateral and multilateral public finance that developed countries pledged for climate projects in developing countries. It covers the years 2021 and 2022.
(These “developed” countries are the 23 “Annex II” nations, plus the EU, that are obliged to provide climate finance under the Paris Agreement.)
The analysis excludes other types of funding that contribute to the $100bn climate-finance target for climate projects, such as export credits and private finance “mobilised” by public investments. Where these have been referenced, the figures are OECD estimates. They are excluded from the analysis because export credits are a small fraction of the total, while private finance mobilised cannot be attributed to specific donor countries.
Data for bilateral funding comes from the biennial transparency reports (BTRs) each country submits to the UNFCCC. The lag in official reporting means the most recent figures – published around the end of 2024 and start of 2025 – only go up to 2022.
Many of the bilateral projects recorded by countries do not specify single recipients, but instead mention several countries. These projects have not been included when calculating the amount of finance individual developing countries received, but they are included in the total figures.
The multilateral funding, including projects funded by MDBs and multilateral climate funds, comes from the OECD. Many countries – including developing countries – pay into these institutions, which then use their money to fund climate projects and, in the case of MDBs, raise additional finance from capital markets.
This analysis calculated the shares of the “outflows” from multilateral institutions that can be attributed to developed countries. It adapts the approach used by the OECD to calculate these attributable shares for developed countries as a whole group.
As the OECD does not publish individual donor country shares that make up the total developed-country contribution, this analysis calculated each country’s attributable shares based on shareholdings in MDBs and cumulative contributions to multilateral funds. This was based on a methodology used by analysts at the World Resources Institute and ODI. There were some multilateral funds that could not be assigned using this methodology, which are therefore not captured in each country’s multilateral contribution.
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Analysis: Seven charts showing how the $100bn climate-finance goal was met
The attacks on climate science by the Trump administration means the US is now “part of the problem” on global warming and “not part of the solution”, says Prof Ben Santer.
Santer – a leading climate scientist and early pioneer in establishing the human “fingerprint” on warming – has played a central role in major climate change reports during his career spanning four decades.
In a wide-ranging interview with Carbon Brief, Santer says the Trump administration is “engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science”.
The “insane” cuts to major scientific institutions, satellite monitoring and climate research funding amounts to “institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate”, he says.
He adds that “we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor”.
It is “heartbreaking” that “many of the best and the brightest [scientists] will leave the country”, says Santer, and go to work in Europe, China, Japan or Australia.
Now semi-retired, Santer himself is relocating to the UK in order to continue his research in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia as it has become “difficult” to do so in the US.
He has been granted a five-year visa under the UK’s “Global Talent” programme.
He says he worries about the US influence on European politics as there “have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance” over to the UK.
The interview was conducted shortly before the Trump administration announced that it was withdrawing from more than 60 international bodies and treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
- On why he is relocating to the UK: “The notion of not being able to do [my] work anymore in the US is unacceptable to me.”
- On his experiences during Trump’s first term: “In the end, the Trump administration did cut the funding for my research and my group’s research in climate change detection and attribution.”
- On managing to continue his work: “I was able to continue my research by cutting down the amount of time that I was actually paid by the Department of Energy.”
- On the reported cuts to US climate science: “It’s unthinkable to actually kill those kinds of critically important measurements, but yet, that’s where we are. It’s heartbreaking.”
- On whether other countries can step into the void: “If the US no longer is willing to lead, is no longer willing to invest in basic monitoring of weather and climate, other countries have to try and fill the gap.”
- On the risks of an “eddy of ignorance” in the US: “We’re part of the problem now in the US, not part of the solution to the problem of climate change.”
- On the Department of Energy climate review: “What did surprise me was just how brazen and blatantly wrong bits of it were.”
- On attacks on climate science: “What’s different today is that it’s an entire administration. This is institutionalised, willful ignorance on the part of the administration.”
- On engaging with science communication: “If you don’t, if you remain silent, then really bad stuff happens.”
- On advice to other scientists: “Only when you push back quickly and forcefully in a united way do you have some hope of avoiding the worst outcomes.”
- On lessons for Europe from US politics: “It’s one I worry about a lot, because there have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance.”
- On the next move for the Trump administration: “I think there will be continued efforts to go after modelling capability, which is – again – heartbreaking.”
- On the EPA’s “endangerment finding”: “I think the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has, right from the beginning, intended to rescind the endangerment finding.”
- On his reflections on Climategate: “When you go after the integrity of individuals and the[ir] decency and honesty – in the public arena – in such a vicious and nasty way, it has consequences.”
- On public trust in scientists: “When there’s this drum beat of incendiary language – “con job”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” – again and again and again, it erodes public trust in science and scientists.”
- On media coverage of climate change: “I do think that there’s more effort to hold the [Trump] administration accountable…for making incorrect claims.”
- On geopolitics affecting the IPCC: “I do worry about this fractured landscape, with powerful forces out there seeking to undermine the work of the IPCC.”
Carbon Brief: Ben, thank you very much for joining us. So, after a long career in the US, you’re now relocating to the UK, where you studied for your degrees. What has prompted your return?
BS: It’s really difficult for me to continue doing work in attribution science in the US in 2026. I’m a scientist – working on identification of human fingerprints on climate is in my life blood. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what I’ve done for the last 40 years. The notion of not being able to do that work anymore in the US is unacceptable to me, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m moving to the UK to continue to do work in trying to disentangle human and natural effects on climate. I’m also coming to the UK because my partner lives here and I want to be with her.
CB: In Trump’s first term [as US president], you were at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I wonder, what impacts did you experience of the Trump administration when you were there?
BS: A number of impacts and those impacts started right at the beginning of the first Trump administration. So Trump’s nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, when he was nominated, had to go through Senate confirmation hearings. During those confirmation hearings, he was asked about the reality and seriousness of climate change. He responded that there had been no significant global warming since 1998. 1998 was a big natural El Nino, natural warming event. And Mr Pruitt was cherrypicking. He was saying [in effect], “when I look at satellite temperature records, the temperature of the lower atmosphere – the troposphere – and only go back to 1998 and then march forward in time, I believe there’s been no significant warming”. That was wrong, demonstrably so.
My colleagues and I at Lawrence Livermore National Lab were asked to investigate Mr Pruitt’s claim. We did. We published a paper in 2017 in the Journal of Climate [it was actually in Scientific Reports], showing that that claim was wrong. Even if one did the cherrypicking and forgot about the pre-1998 portion of the satellite temperature record. The LA Times [it was actually the Washington Post] reported on our Journal of Climate paper and I think it’s fair to say that the Trump administration did not like that we had factchecked Mr Pruitt. And did not like that we had shown that his on-the-record statement to the US Senate was wrong.
That incident led to a complaint by the Trump Department of Energy – the funder, primary funder, of Lawrence Livermore National Lab – to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The director asked for a meeting with me and, during that meeting, told me that the Trump administration was in a position to cut my funding for detection and attribution research at Livermore – and, indeed, to cut funding for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In the end, the Trump administration did cut the funding for my research and my group’s research in climate change detection and attribution. In my opinion, that was a direct result of doing science [by] factchecking Mr Pruitt. The administration didn’t like that and they didn’t like the result of the factchecking.
CB: So, how were you able to continue your research at the time?
BS: I was able to continue my research by cutting down the amount of time that I was actually paid by the Department of Energy. So, essentially, I reduced my time at Livermore in order to allow my younger colleagues to continue to do this critically important work. At the time of these cuts, I had been in my position at Livermore for nearly three decades. I was at the tail end of my career. They were not – my younger colleagues were not – and I wanted them to continue to have sufficient funding to do this work.
CB: Fast forward to the Trump second term and there have been reported cuts to climate science and related programmes at the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency], NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research], NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and NASA. I wonder which of these concerns you the most?
BS: They are all of deep concern to me. I would say the administration – the second Trump Administration – has engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science and not only climate science in the US, but I know the climate science piece of things reasonably well. They’ve gone after monitoring. They’ve gone after computer modelling. They’ve gone after people who do the kind of attribution science work that I do; people who look at extreme events and human contribution to the changes in the properties of extreme events – droughts, flooding, all of that – they’ve fired thousands of employees.
And when you break the evidentiary chain, when you no longer monitor, say, changes in Arctic sea ice extent or carbon emissions or atmospheric temperature, you make it difficult for people like me to get at the causes of climate change. That’s a deep, deep concern that we may no longer be able to continuously monitor stuff that we urgently need to monitor, not only for climate, but also for basic weather prediction. For example, if you stop monitoring atmospheric moisture, then you degrade the quality of weather forecasts that give you early warning of severe storms, of atmospheric rivers – it’s unthinkable to actually kill those kinds of critically important measurements, but yet, that’s where we are. It’s heartbreaking.
I have hundreds of colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at the [NASA] Goddard Institute for Space Studies – women and men who have devoted their entire scientific careers to trying to model the climate system, understand the climatic shape of things to come. Many of them, particularly probationary employees, are gone. And you can’t flip a switch under a more enlightened administration, which we hope we get in three years from now, and bring all of that back. Science doesn’t work that way. Many of the best and the brightest will leave the country and will go to Europe or go to China or go to Japan or Australia. They will leave the US. They will see no future for themselves there. Or they won’t even come to the country to study, to do degrees – and that loss of talented, dedicated researchers is heartbreaking. That’s the only word for it.
CB: You mentioned a lot of programmes that have been cut – for example, monitoring. Do you think other countries can step into the void? And, if so, who and how?
BS: I hope so. I hope the Europeans and the Chinese and the Australians and the Japanese are making serious contingency plans – and recognising that this is a real thing. The Trump administration is going to turn off satellites. They’ve announced their intent to severely cut NASA and go after things like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other remote sensing systems that make measurements that they don’t like. So hopefully other space agencies recognise the danger to this evidentiary chain.
But, again, that’s not like flipping a switch that you can suddenly launch a satellite – developing sensors, deploying sensors in space – all of that is the stuff of years, not the stuff of a couple of months. But I hope that these kinds of discussions are going on at the highest level in countries that recognise the value of information – again, not only for climate, but for basic weather forecasting. If the US no longer is willing to lead, is no longer willing to invest in basic monitoring of weather and climate, other countries have to try and fill the gap.
CB: Shortly before Trump won his second term, you wrote that his election risks trapping the US and the planet in an “eddy of ignorance”. I wonder what your reflections are now that Trump is in power?
BS: We are in that “eddy of ignorance” in the US. Clearly, this administration seeks to redefine reality itself; seeks in its public-facing websites – say NASA, EPA – to generate a picture of a world where climate isn’t changing, or if it is, the changes are purely natural – they’re due to the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations; humans have no agency, have no discernible influence on climate. So, they’re creating an alternative universe in which human caused fossil fuel burning has no impact on climate. And what do you even call that? “Eddy of ignorance” is too weak a term to describe that willful misrepresentation of the world we actually live in – of the climate we actually live in – how it’s changed, how it’s likely to change it. It’s – again – heartbreaking when you think of the destruction of information on websites, the destruction of libraries – like, as has recently been reported, the Goddard Space Flight Centre library of volumes about atmospheric science, ocean science – the thought of that stuff going away, of not being there anymore. I don’t know what to do with that, I guess.
The only thing I can do with it – and have tried to do with that kind of willful ignorance – is shine a light on it and say “this is wrong”. No matter what differences in political positions we have, we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor. That’s where we are in the US – president Trump is defining reality and we risk – as many have written – going back to the Soviet Lysenkoism, where any science that conflicts with the prevailing political views of the leader is dismissed and denied. And that has serious negative consequences – of course, not only for the US, but for the entire world. We’re part of the problem now in the US, not part of the solution to the problem of climate change.
CB: You mentioned the Department of Energy (DoE) earlier and its involvement in the Lawrence Livermore Lab. And I wonder what your reaction was to their “critical review” on climate change that they published last year?
BS: So they published this review in July of 2025. It involved five noted climate change sceptics. I had dealt with all of them over the course of my time at Livermore. It was not a surprise that the administration was going to try and come up with some counter narrative to IPCC and national climate assessments. But what did surprise me was just how brazen and blatantly wrong bits of it were.
So, I’ll give you an example. Chapter 5.5 of this Department of Energy climate working group review dealt with temperature changes in the stratosphere. And it touched on work that my colleagues and I had had done and published most recently in 2023 in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the DoE report cited our 2023 paper and said that we had not found a human fingerprint on climate. We had. We had found the most convincing evidence yet of a human fingerprint on the structure of atmospheric temperature. This predicted fingerprint of warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the upper atmosphere – predicted by Suki Manabe back in 1967 – we had found it in satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature change. And we had found that this signal was particularly clear where Manabi had predicted back in ‘67 – that it would be clear right in the upper stratosphere. The Department of Energy, in saying “you didn’t find a fingerprint”, was essentially doing the equivalent of something like this: The walls here in this room were white. They’re essentially telling you, “no, they’re not white, they’re black”. What do you do with something like that? When someone mischaracterises your own work and the work of your colleagues – sober, mature science that you’ve spent decades doing – and fundamentally turns it on his head in an official government report for a specific political purpose.
You know, the report was released on the same day as EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced his intent to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding – the finding that emissions of greenhouse gases, through their effect on temperature and through temperature effects on air pollution, materially harm human health. So, this report fed into that political goal of wanting to repeal the endangerment finding. And our science is being misrepresented to support that political goal. That was pretty shocking to me – that it would be so blatant. There was no pretence, really, of trying to get the science right. And the example that I just mentioned – with our vertical fingerprint work with atmospheric temperature – is only one example of many dozens that the Dessler report takedown – and Carbon Brief’s own takedown of the many errors in the DoE report – showed. This was a pattern of behaviour. My job is about pattern analysis and there was a pattern in the DoE report of trying to misrepresent well-understood science.
CB: Your career has spanned periods where climate science has been attacked quite fiercely – back to the time of Kyoto in the 90s or Climategate at the end of the 2000s. What parallels or differences do you see today?
BS: So, back in the mid-90s, the attacks focused on the IPCC second assessment report. That report came out in early 1996 and its headline finding was the infamous 12-word statement: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” And that was significant because it was the first time that the international scientific community said formally: “We see a signal of human activity.” Other individual scientists had made such claims in the past – notably, Jim Hansen in 1988 in a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. But this was the international community, the IPCC, saying: “Hey, humans are no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system. We formally identified a climate change signal due to our actions. It’s not the sun, it’s not volcanoes, it’s not natural internal variability, it’s on us.”
And as the play Kyoto, which you just mentioned, clearly notes, that was threatening – that discernible human influence finding – to very powerful, moneyed interests. To, for example, the Global Climate Coalition – a consortium of energy interests – they recognised that this was bad for business, that this finding might have downstream implications for their business models, for their ability to continue burning fossil fuels without considering the negative externalities of their actions. So the Global Climate Coalition and other fossil-fuel funded organisations – Western Fuels [Association], the Petroleum Association [the American Petroleum Institute] – went after the IPCC and went after me. No personal animus, but I was the lead author of the chapter in which this finding was situated. And individual folks in Congress, too, like Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman, wanted to make names for themselves and felt that they could do so by casting doubt on the integrity of the IPCC process – the scientific integrity of people like me. So there was some attempt back then to politicise the science too. It wasn’t just fossil-fuel interests that went after the IPCC. It was also folks like Rohrabacher who wanted to make a name for themselves.
What’s different today is that it’s an entire administration. This is institutionalised, willful ignorance on the part of the administration – institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate. That’s qualitatively different from anything I encountered in the mid-90s at the time of the IPCC second assessment report.
CB: If you were in the earlier stages of your career now, as you were then, do you think you would be just as involved in communication and public engagement on climate change?
BS: Absolutely. The lesson I learned 30 years ago – back at the time of the discernible human influence finding in 1996 – was, sometimes, you don’t have the luxury of sitting on the fence and just waiting to see how things develop. Back then, I was a representative of an entire scientific community. My job had been to – with my peers – assess the then-available science and come up with our best representation of what the science, back then – 30 years told us – and we did and we were right. The cautious, even wimpy, “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” [statement] was justified by the then-available science. And, in the next 30 years, the science progressed – better models, longer data records, better fingerprint techniques for disentangling human and natural effects on climate, more scientists involved in this kind of work all over the world – leading to the word “unequivocal”.
It is now unequivocal, as the IPCC judged in its 2021 sixth assessment report [on climate science], that there are human fingerprints all over Earth’s climate system – atmosphere, oceans, land surface. Back then, in 1995-96, we were primarily looking at surface thermometer records, surface temperature records. Now, folks have interrogated literally dozens of variables – Arctic sea ice extent, atmospheric moisture, specific humidity, sea level pressure, ocean heat content, clouds, circulation patterns, extreme event properties – you name it, they’ve looked at it. They’ve kicked the tires. They’ve used pattern recognition methods to assess whether purely natural influences can explain the changes in each of those independently measured variables – natural causes can’t.
And that’s the frustration, I would say – this disconnect between this much more mature understanding of causes now in 2021 and this willful ignorance that we see in the Trump administration. Where the president of your own country refers to all of the work that you’ve done and your colleagues have done as a “con job”. So not only wrong, but criminal – as if there’s intent, on your part and your colleagues’ part, to mislead the global public about the reality and seriousness of climate change. The only response, in my opinion, is you have to, as a scientist, push back against that. If you don’t, if you remain silent, then really bad stuff happens. And I think that’s true for our democracy as well. If good people remain silent when there are serious challenges facing science and democracy, we all lose.
CB: What would be your advice to climate scientists in the US today, particularly those leading the organisations under attack?
BS: “Hang together or hang separately,” as Benjamin Franklin, I believe, famously said. You have to provide some kind of united front to these systematic efforts to dismantle US science. If you don’t, if you leave that to individuals or let the administration attack individual universities, you’re not going to prevail in preventing really serious harms. And I would say it’s taken the scientific community a long time to recognise that. In the US, certain institutions that should have led right from the beginning and said, “no, this is wrong”. Going after the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and going after vaccine schedules harms public health. People will die. Those kinds of messages needed to be made public very early, very forcefully – and they weren’t.
Same with climate science – starting to fire probationary employees, starting to go after climate modelling and to argue that modellers were scaring America’s children by making projections of the climatic shape of things to come. All of that demanded a firm, clear response, which was late in coming. And unfortunately, again, many of the harms that happened in those first few months – the firings, the withholding of grant money that will affect research at universities, climate research, medical research labs, the continuity of whole departments – those harms can’t be easily reversed. I think, for me, the personal lesson learned from the first administration is only when you push back quickly and forcefully in a united way do you have some hope of avoiding the worst outcomes.
CB: We’ve seen how quickly US federal climate science policy has changed under a new government. I wonder what lessons can European governments and institutions and scientists take from that on protecting climate science, regardless of political change?
BS: That’s a great question and it’s one I worry about a lot, because there have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance, say, to this country [the UK]. Steve Koonin, one of the five authors of the DoE climate working group report, has tried to persuade British colleagues that the science – the climate science done, say, at the Hadley Centre and other research centres and universities isn’t credible, that they shouldn’t make policy based on IPCC or internal climate assessments. And I think we’ll see more of that. I think the Royal Society needs to be very clear that it has to push back against those efforts to try and export our willful ignorance to this country and to Europe.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Those efforts are only just starting to ramp up in the US. We hear that the same five folks who worked on the DoE report are going to be in charge of the next [US] national climate assessment. And I would not be surprised to see folks like Koonin and others make more appearances over here and it’s in the [Trump] administration’s interests to undermine climate science internationally. Why? Because then they can say, well, “buy our oil – there are no consequences, no climate consequences. And the people who have told you that there are climate consequences are not real, credible scientists – believe our five hand-picked experts who wrote this DoE report and are now rewriting national climate assessments.”
I think you need here, in the UK, to observe what happened and the institutional failures to push back against this kind of willful ignorance and to learn from those failures. It really is critically important to support science and leading institutions can’t be silent. They can’t say, oh, we don’t want to offend president Trump, or we don’t want to offend Elon Musk, who is one of our members in the Royal Society. No, you will suffer serious, long-lasting reputational harm if you don’t defend science. That’s my lesson learned.
CB: Where do you see things going next in the US? What’s the next move for the Trump administration on climate change?
BS: Well, what I’ve mentioned already is that the five individuals who wrote the DoE’s climate working group report in July 2025 have apparently been tasked with leading the next national climate assessment, which is a congressionally mandated report to Congress. And it’s likely that that will be the same stuff we saw in the DoE report in July 2025 – a counter narrative, if you will, to mature scientific understanding encoded in 30+ years of IPCC reports. So, on the science side of things, it’s about presenting that counter narrative. It’s also, I think, about continuing to dismantle websites and continuing to present the public on EPA and NASA and NOAA websites with a very, very different understanding of the causes of climate change.
It’s – if Congress doesn’t do anything to stop it – going to involve continued cuts to NASA. The Trump administration has made it very clear that they don’t care about observing changes in Earth’s climate from space and they’re going to go after missions that they don’t like that provide basics – atmospheric temperature and atmospheric moisture and, again, pollutants, CO2 emissions, methane emissions, all of those kind of things I would say are imperilled, which is insane. That’s the only word for it. Removing our ability to measure and monitor how the world around us is changing, makes no sense whatsoever. But, yet, that’s where we are, because the data is inconvenient and doesn’t comport with the narrative of the president, that nothing is happening, nothing is changing, or if it is, it’s all natural.
I think there will be continued efforts to go after modelling capability, which is – again – heartbreaking. Some of the institutions I mentioned – like the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, Goddard Institute for Space Studies [GISS] – they’re already under attack. Their funding is under attack. Their leases, in the case of GISS, have been rescinded or cancelled. There are efforts to break up these groups of very, very talented women and men and scatter them to the wind. I think that’s going to continue. And what will be important will be to see whether Congress pushes back against these things or is fearful of incurring Trump’s wrath and allows this sort of stuff to continue internationally.
I think the US is not going to engage with IPCC or UN Framework Convention [on Climate Change] or COPs. [The Trump administration has now withdrawn the US from the IPCC and UNFCCC.] They don’t care. All they care about is exporting US and now Venezuelan oil, presumably. And they don’t care about advancing climate science or any kind of science, really, which is an unbelievable thing to say, coming from a country where science has, since the end of the second world war, been an integral part of the country, of its development, of its economy, of its of its future. Now we’re turning away from science in the US. It’s like we’re handing the baton of leadership to you and saying, “here, we’re done leading in climate science, medical science – you lead now, rest of the world, we’re going to go back and try and make the horse and buggy great again”.
CB: What do you see happening to the [EPA’s] “endangerment finding”?
BS: I think the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has, right from the beginning, intended to rescind the endangerment finding – following Trump’s lead and following the guidance of Project 2025 [A blueprint to reshape the US federal government under a Republican president, published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organisations.] There are powerful interests in the US that, right from the beginning, have argued, “the endangerment finding is bad for business, so get rid of it. This should be an important thrust of the second Trump administration.” And it has been, right from the beginning of the administration. And part of the job has been to come up with this scientific counter narrative – in the DoE report and, I believe, now in the planned next national climate assessment – to argue that, “the science isn’t credible. We don’t need an endangerment finding because human actions aren’t endangering the climate. It’s all natural, folks. Nothing to see here.” That’s going to continue.
But, as I mentioned, that faces challenges, that counter narrative now, because it was so badly done. The DoE report was so sloppy, so riddled with mistakes – some of which were really transparent, not shades of grey differences between experts, but really badly wrong stuff. That’s the DoE report. The factchecking on that report has been done. It’s out there, [it] got widespread publicity – thank you Carbon Brief; thank you, Andy Dessler. The fast track study of the US National Academy of Sciences – done partly in response to the DoE report – has affirmed and confirmed the science is credible. Humans are influencing global climate through burning fossil fuels, through particulate pollution, and we need to do something about it. This is a serious danger to human health.
So, Mr Zeldin’s challenge is a difficult one. I would say he’s got powerful scientific – well, decades of mature science – that he’s going against, that he’s tilting against. And that’s going to be a tough sell. But, that said, it’ll wind up before the US supreme court and the supreme court has a conservative majority. How they adjudicate, given that they already decided back in 2009 [it was actually 2007] that climate change constitutes a danger to human health, will they reverse their decision? There’s a lot of uncertainty. But one thing that is very certain is that Trump wants the endangerment finding rescinded and everything flows from that.
CB: I want to look back now a little bit more. We’re now 15+ years on since Climategate [when thousands of emails between climate scientists were stolen from a university server and selectively released online in an attempt to undermine COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009]. And I wondered how you feel about that whole experience now?
BS: Pretty bad about the whole experience. I did my PhD at the Climatic Research Unit at UEA [the University of East Anglia]. I got my PhD in 1987 and I then went to Hamburg to do a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute [for Meteorology]. Then, after Max Planck, I went to Livermore in 1992 and I continued to work together with people at the Climatic Research Unit. They weren’t only colleagues. They were friends. We published a boatload of papers together. Watching what happened, what unfolded in 2009 and thereafter was terrible. The human cost hasn’t really been revealed – to good people who spent their lives trying to compile surface temperature data sets.
The case of Phil Jones, in the case of Keith Briffa – to do dendrochronology and advance understanding of century timescale changes in climate from looking at tree rings – all of that good work was dragged through the mud by these forces of unreason, by folks who had no real understanding of the science of the integrity of the work. It was sickening and disgusting to witness bad things happen to such good people. I spent a fair bit of time back then in 2009 and 2010 providing input to various investigations, speaking publicly about the individuals involved, and I remain deeply concerned at that human cost. This isn’t a game. When you go after the integrity of individuals and the[ir] decency and honesty – in the public arena – in such a vicious and nasty way, it has consequences.
Some of those consequences aren’t visible to people on the outside, who don’t know folks like Phil Jones and folks like Keith Briffa and others deeply involved in Climategate – folks like Michael Mann. But those consequences, those personal consequences, are very real and I’m concerned that that’s where we’re going again. The way forward, say, for the Trump administration is to challenge the integrity and decency and honesty and motives of climate scientists – as is occurring with use of incendiary language like “con job”. That’s where we’re going again.
CB: How do you think that public trust in climate science – and scientists – compares now to back then?
BS: Well, language matters. Words matter. That’s been a lesson of mine – a lesson I learned back in 1995 with those 12 words with the “discernible human influence” finding. So when there’s this drum beat of incendiary language – “con job”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” – again and again and again, it erodes public trust in science and scientists: “Well, the President surely wouldn’t be saying these things if there weren’t something behind them.” These folks have huge megaphones that they can exploit on a daily basis.
They are in control of the levers of power now – websites at NASA, NOAA, EPA. The president can address the UN General Assembly and use this kind of “con job” language, “you’re all fools if you believe scientists”. I have to believe that that has impact – cumulative impact. If you keep on doing it again and again and again, you can erode public confidence in science. And that’s why part of my job, as I see it, is to be a public figure – to speak and to write about evidence: “How do we know? How have we reached this time in history when we know that we’re not innocent bystanders in the climate system. What’s the nature of the evidence? Who gained it? How did they gain it? Do scientists look at alternate hypotheses? Could it all be the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations, intrinsic variability?” We have to do a better job explaining how we know and why it matters to what’s at stake here.
This [year] is likely – 2025 – to be the second- or third-warmest year ever. [This has now been confirmed.] And, over my lifetime, I’ve seen the signal of human-caused warming emerge from the noise of natural variability. We know it’s real. We know that if we do nothing to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, that signal is going to manifest more clearly every year. So it’s critically, just critically, important to speak science to power and continue to push back against this narrative of “con job” and “hoax” and “conspiracy”. But it’s an uphill struggle. Again, given that I can have an interview with you, I can write stuff in Scientific American, but the president can reach tens of millions of people every day.
CB: Just thinking about the media, how do you think the media’s coverage of climate science has changed over time?
BS: I think it’s gotten better. Certainly back in the 90s, it was much more this binary, “he says, she says” type things: “Here’s Expert A, here’s Expert B, giving you some completely different view of a scientific question.” I would say that the reporting is now much more focused on trying to understand the science and rather than having duelling experts out there. Even in the US, we don’t get [prominent climate-sceptic scientists] Dick Lindzen or John Christy now, as we used to on every story about warming and changes in sea ice. You don’t get the counter narrative out there. And that’s good and that’s really positive.
Much of the reporting is now more in depth about what’s going on with the Thwaites great glacier, or what’s going on with sea level and what are the drivers of sea level rise? And all of that is good and positive. And I do think that there’s more effort to hold the administration accountable – the Trump administration accountable – for making incorrect claims. We were unwilling to use the word “lie” at the beginning of the first Trump administration. People are more willing now to say, “this is untrue, there’s no scientific basis for this statement or that statement”, and that’s good, too.
What I think is necessary, as I said before, is for more voices to enter the fray – for the leadership of powerful professional organisations to say, “this claim by the administration that climate science is a ‘con job’ is wrong. It’s not. And here are three decades of reports that we published that show that it’s a thing and we need to worry about it.” It can’t be just individual voices there of a few climate scientists speaking about the reality and seriousness of climate change.
CB: So, you have, obviously, been heavily involved in all IPCC reports throughout the years. We’re now at the early stages of the seventh assessment and countries are still yet to agree on a timeline for publication of the assessment reports. And I wonder what you thought that says about the state of climate politics today?
BS: Well, I’ve been involved in every IPCC assessment since the first one in 1990. I think they’re unique. They’re an invaluable way of providing the collective understanding of an entire community and showing how that understanding has evolved over time. I hope the IPCC continues. I think there’s a continuing need for an authoritative international organisation to say: “This is our best understanding of the science and this is our best understanding of likely outcomes if we do nothing to address the problem, or we follow this emission scenario, or this overshoot scenario.” We need that and it’s clearly good to be able to put error bars on these projections, to have the entire global scientific community involved – and be able to say: “This is what we know with confidence, this is what we don’t know with confidence. Here are our levels of confidence.”
All of that is extraordinary when you think about it, how a community has come together to make these authoritative assessments of the state of our understanding. Which is why it’s been so threatening, I think, to the Trump administration and why they pulled out of IPCC [in 2025] and why they don’t like it.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Because it doesn’t support the president’s narrative that this is a “con job” and that history is valuable to see how, over time, things have firmed up, how the “balance of evidence” finding was transformed into “unequivocal” human fingerprints on climate. Capturing that arc of history, that arc of scientific understanding.
But the IPCC has challenges. The US is backing out now. There are some efforts on the part of the philanthropic community to allow individual US scientists to participate. I hope that that continues. I hope that the US, in some way or other, continues to make scientific contributions to the IPCC. But I do worry about this fractured landscape, with powerful forces out there seeking to undermine the work of the IPCC. We’re going to see the rise of those forces – not only in the US, but elsewhere – to silence or diminish the effectiveness of voices like IPCC. So we need to be prepared for that and we need to have very clear communications about the richness of the evidence.
I think the scientific community and the IPCC maybe haven’t been that good in terms of explaining just how compelling the evidence is for human effects on climate – just how multivariate it is: atmosphere, ocean, land, temperature, moisture, circulation, ice. It’s everywhere. It’s in our backyards. It’s not just evidence of human effects on climate in the far flung Arctic or a few Pacific islands, we need to communicate that better.
CB: Thank you so much for your time.
The post Prof Ben Santer: Trump administration is ‘embracing ignorance’ on climate science appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Prof Ben Santer: Trump administration is ‘embracing ignorance’ on climate science
Climate Change
Q&A: What UK’s record auction for offshore wind means for bills and clean power by 2030
A record-breaking amount of new offshore wind capacity has been secured at the UK’s latest auction for renewable energy projects.
Five fixed-foundation projects, amounting to 8.25 gigawatts (GW), secured fixed-price “contracts for difference” (CfDs) to supply electricity for an average of £91 per megawatt hour (MWh).
Additionally, two floating offshore wind projects with a combined capacity of 192.5 megawatts (MW) won contracts, securing a “strike price” of £216/MWh.
This new capacity, totalling 8.4GW, marks a significant increase from last year’s sixth auction, when 5.3GW had been secured as part of a bounce back from the “failed” fifth round.
While the latest auction saw offshore wind prices rising by around 10% since the previous round, analysis suggests that the outcome will, nevertheless, be roughly “cost neutral” for consumers.
Contrary to simplistic and misleading comparisons made by some opposition politicians and media commentators, this is because CfD payments would be balanced by lower wholesale costs.
The government welcomed the “stonking” results, saying that it put the country “on track” to reach its 2030 targets for clean power, create jobs and bring new investment.
Below, Carbon Brief looks at the auction results, what they mean for bills and the implications for the UK’s target of “clean power by 2030”.
- What happened in the seventh CfD auction round?
- What does the record offshore-wind auction mean for bills?
- What does AR7 mean for reaching clean power by 2030?
What happened in the seventh CfD auction round (AR7)?
The UK government announced the results of the seventh auction round (AR7) for new CfDs on 14 January 2026, hailing the outcome as a “historic win”.
The CfD scheme was introduced in 2014 and offers fixed-price contracts to generators via a “reverse auction” process. The first auction was held in 2015.
Projects bid to secure contracts to sell electricity at a fixed “strike price” in the future.
If wholesale prices are lower than this set amount, the project receives a payment that makes up the difference.
However, if the market prices are higher than this level, then the project pays back the difference to consumers. For example, according to a report from thinktank Onward, between November 2021 and January 2022, CfD projects paid back £114.4m to consumers.
For the seventh auction round, the results have been split into two, as part of reforms to help expedite the process for offshore wind. As such, the publication of results on 14 January covers fixed-foundation offshore wind and floating offshore wind.
A second set of results will be released between 6-9 February 2026, covering technologies including large-scale solar and onshore wind.
A total of 17 fixed-foundation offshore wind projects totalling 24.8GW of capacity were competing for contracts at this auction, meaning many have missed out.
Still, a record 8.4GW of offshore wind secured contracts, making it the biggest ever offshore wind auction in Europe, according to industry group WindEurope.
This includes 8,245 megawatts (MW) of fixed-foundation offshore wind and 192.5MW of floating offshore wind, which, collectively, will generate enough to power more than 12m homes.
As such, there was an increase of more than 3GW in offshore wind capacity compared to the sixth allocation round, as shown in the chart below.
(The 2.4GW Hornsea 4 scheme, which had been awarded a CfD at the previous auction round, went on to be cancelled in May 2025, with developer Ørsted citing cost inflation.)
This follows on from the “fiasco” of the fifth allocation round in 2023, where no offshore-wind projects secured contracts due to the limit on prices set by the government.
Carbon Brief analysis suggests that the capacity secured in the latest auction will generate around 37 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity each year, around 12% of the nation’s total demand.
With onshore wind and solar results still to come, this means that projects with CfDs will generate some 135TWh of power by the time they are all completed, or nearly half of current demand.
When the current Labour government took office in 2024, a number of changes were made to encourage offshore wind capacity bids. This included separating the technology from solar and onshore wind into a separate “pot”, an allowance for “permitted reduction” projects in AR6 and a significant increase to the “budget” for the auction overall.
Since then, there have been continued reforms to help meet the government’s target of decarbonising power supplies by 2030. (See: What does AR7 mean for clean power by 2030.)
This includes extending the contracts from 15 years to 20 years, relaxing eligibility requirements related to planning consent and legislating to allow the secretary of state for energy – currently, Ed Miliband – to see anonymised bid information ahead of setting a final budget for that technology.
Initially, the government set a total budget of £900m for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects and £180m for floating offshore wind.
The budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind projects was then raised to £1,790m.
(Note that the “budget” is a notional limit on the amount of CfD levies that can be added to consumer electricity bills. This does not come from government coffers and – as explained below – it does not translate into an equivalent increase in consumer costs, because CfD projects also reduce wholesale electricity prices, which make up the bulk of bills.)
Ahead of the auction, the maximum “administrative” strike price was set at £113/MWh for offshore wind and £271/MWh for floating offshore wind.
The four winning fixed-foundation offshore wind projects in England and Wales secured a strike price of £91.20/MWh in 2024 prices and the one in Scotland £89.49/MWh, as shown in the table below. This comes out at a blended average of £90.91/MWh.
| Projects (fixed-foundation) | Capacity (MW) | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awel y Mor | 775 | RWE, SWM, Siemens Financial Services | £91.20/MWh | 2030/31 |
| Dogger Bank South | 3,000 | RWE, Masdar | £91.20/MWh | 2030/2031 |
| Norfolk Vanguard East | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Norfolk Vanguard West | 1,545 | RWE | £91.20/MWh | 2028/2029 |
| Berwick Bank | 1,380 | SSE Renewables | £89.49/MWh | 2030/2031 |
The two floating offshore-wind projects will see a strike price of £216.46/MWh, shown below.
| Projects (floating) | Capacity | Owners | Strike price (2024 prices) | Delivery year (phase one) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentland | 92.5 | CIP, Eurus Energy, Hexicon | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
| Erebus | 100 | TotalEnergies, Simply Blue Energy | £216.46/MWh | 2029/2030 |
These prices are around 19% below the maximum level set ahead of the auction – a figure that had been cited by opposition politicians as “proof” that the round would be a “bad deal” for consumers.
Successful projects include RWE’s Awel Y Mor (775MW), the first Welsh project to win a CfD contract in more than a decade.
Dogger Bank South in Yorkshire and Norfolk Vanguard in East Anglia – which will be two of the largest offshore windfarms in the world – at 3GW and 3.1GW, respectively – both secured contracts.
Additionally, Berwick Bank in the North Sea became the first new Scottish project to win a CfD since 2022. At 4.1GW, the project being developed by SSE Renewables is the largest planned offshore-wind project in the world.
The projects are located around the UK, which is expected to ease grid connections. Nick Civetta, project leader at Aurora Energy Research, noted in a statement:
“83% of the capacity connects in areas of high power demand and greater network capacity, lowering the cost of managing the system.”
In terms of companies, German developer RWE has dominated the auction outcome, with 6.9GW of the capacity being developed overall.
What does the record offshore-wind auction mean for bills?
The auction results arrive at a moment of intense interest in energy bills, which remain significantly higher than before the global energy crisis in 2022.
The government, along with much of the energy industry, said the new offshore wind projects would lower bills, relative to the alternative of relying on more gas.
Meanwhile opposition politicians and right-leaning media used misleading figures to argue that gas power is cheap or that the new offshore wind projects would add large costs to bills.
Broadly speaking, there is some evidence to suggest that electricity bills will rise over the years to 2030 – largely as a result of investment in the grid – before starting to decline.
However, this is the case whether the UK pushes forward with its efforts to expand clean power or not – and is mainly dependent on the timing of electricity network investments and the price of gas.
At the same time, electricity demand is starting to rise as the economy electrifies – as shown in the figure below – and many of the UK’s existing power plants are nearing the end of their lives.
This means that new electricity generation will be needed, whether from offshore wind, gas-fired power stations or from other sources.
Adam Berman, director of policy and advocacy at industry group Energy UK, said ahead of the auction that renewables were the “cheapest” source of new supplies.
Similarly, Pranav Menon, senior associate at consultancy Aurora Energy Research, tells Carbon Brief that the key question is how to meet rising demand most cost-effectively. He says:
“Here, it is quite clear that the answer is renewables (up to a certain price and volume), given that new-build gas is much more expensive…(even after accounting for costs and intermittency for renewables).”
The government said that the price for offshore wind secured through AR7 was “40% lower than the cost of building and operating a new gas power plant”. It added:
“Britain has taken a monumental step towards ending the country’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels and lowering bills for good, by delivering a record-breaking offshore wind result in its latest renewables auction.”
In a similar vein, Dhara Vyas, head of Energy UK said in a statement that the results would “deliver lower bills”. She added:
“Today’s auction results will deliver critical national infrastructure that will strengthen our energy security and deliver lower bills, as well as provide jobs, investment and economic growth right across Great Britain.”
These statements rely on updated government estimates of the cost of different electricity-generating technologies, published alongside the auction results.
They also rely on two studies published by Aurora and another consultancy, Baringa, both commissioned by renewable energy firms involved in the auction.
The government’s new cost estimates reflect the inflationary pressures that have hit turbines for gas-fired generation, as well as offshore wind supply chains.
Carbon Brief analysis of the latest and previous figures suggests that the government thinks the cost of building a gas-fired power station has more than doubled. (Reports from the US point to even steeper three-fold increases in gas turbine costs.)
As such, building and operating new gas-fired power stations would be relatively expensive, at £147/MWh, according to the government. (This assumes the gas plant would only be operating during 30% of hours in each year, in line with the current UK fleet.)
While the offshore wind prices secured in AR7 are around 10% higher than in AR6, at £91/MWh, they would still be considerably lower than the cost of a new gas plant.
However, these figures for new gas and for offshore wind in AR7 do not reflect the wider system costs of keeping the electricity grid running at all times.
In late 2025, Baringa concluded that a strike price of up to £94.50/MWh for up to 8GW of offshore wind would be “cost neutral”. This does not include system balancing costs, which the study argues are relatively modest for each additional gigawatt of capacity.
Carbon Brief understands that, when taking this into account, the “cost neutral” price for further offshore capacity would be reduced by a few pounds. This implies that the AR7 result at £91/MWh is likely to be in or around the “cost-neutral” range, based on Baringa’s assumptions.
Also, in late 2025, Aurora concluded that new offshore wind could be secured at “no net cost to consumers”, provided that contracts were agreed at no more than £94/MWh.
In contrast to Baringa’s work, this study is based on what an Aurora press release describes as a “total system cost analysis”. This means it takes into account the cost of dealing with the variable output of offshore wind, such as system balancing and backup.
In an updated note following the results of the auction, Aurora said that it would “generate net consumer savings of just over £1bn up to 2035”. This is relative to a scenario where no offshore wind had been procured at the latest auction.
(In its pre-auction analysis, Aurora pointed to a reduction in consumer electricity bills of around £20 per household per year by 2035, relative to relying on more gas power instead.)
Writing on LinkedIn, Aurora data analyst Ivan Bogachev said that this was the case, even though it might appear to be “counterintuitive”. He added:
“Moreover, AR7 projects are primarily clustered in areas which see few network constraints, limiting any contribution to higher balancing costs.”
In contrast, Conservative shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho and right-leaning media commentators cited misleading figures to claim that the auction was “locking us in” to high prices.
Coutinho has repeatedly cited a figure for the cost of fuel needed to run a gas-fired power station in summer 2025 – some £55/MWh – as if this is a fair reflection of the cost of electricity from gas.
However, this excludes the cost of carbon, which gas plants must pay under the UK emissions trading system and the “carbon price support”. It also ignores the cost of building new gas-fired capacity, which as noted above has soared in recent years.
Dr Callum McIver, a researcher at the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, tells Carbon Brief that “you can’t credibly strip out the cost of carbon” and that the £55/MWh figure is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison with the AR7 result.
McIver says that a fairer comparison would be with a new-build gas plant, which, according to the latest DESNZ cost of generation report, would come in at £147/MWh – and would remain at £104/MWh, even if the cost of carbon is ignored.
UKERC director Prof Robert Gross, at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief that Coutinho’s £55/MWh figure for gas is “unrealistically low” because it is below current wholesale prices, which averaged around £80/MWh in 2025.
Gross adds that, as well as ignoring carbon pricing, the figure is also for “existing and not new gas stations, which we will need and which will need to recover much increased CAPEX [capital cost]”.
Another factor often not taken into account by those criticising the price of renewable energy contracts is that these projects reduce wholesale prices, as noted in Aurora’s modelling.
Separate analysis published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank finds that wholesale power prices would have been 46% higher in 2025 – at £121/MWh rather than £83/MWh – if there had been no windfarms generating electricity.
This is because windfarms push the most expensive gas plants off the system, reducing average wholesale prices. This is a well-known phenomenon known as the “merit order effect”.
What does AR7 mean for reaching clean power by 2030?
Offshore wind is expected to be the backbone of the UK’s electricity mix in 2030, making the stakes for this CfD auction particularly high.
Under the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) independent advice to the government, half of electricity demand will be met by offshore wind by 2030. It says this requires between 43GW and 51GW of generating capacity from the technology.
This advice informed the government’s action plan for meeting 100% of electricity demand with clean power by the end of the decade, which also sets a target of 43-50GW of offshore wind.
Currently, the UK has around 17GW of installed offshore wind capacity, leaving a gap of 27-34GW to the government’s target range.
A further 10GW of capacity already had a CfD prior to the latest auction, excluding the cancelled Hornsea 4 project. The additional 8.4GW contracted in AR7 means the remaining gap to the minimum 43GW end of the government’s range is just 7GW, as shown below.
Speaking to journalists after the auction results were announced, Chris Stark, who is head of “Mission Control” for clean power 2030, told journalists that securing 8.4GW in AR7 put the UK on track for its targets. He added:
“The result today actually takes us now to within touching distance of the goals that we set for 2030 – more to come on that, as I mentioned, with the onshore technologies and the storage projects up and down this country.
“But this is, I think, a real endorsement for the steps that Ed Miliband has taken to bring about that goal of clean power by 2030, it will bring huge benefits to people here in the UK.”
There remain a number of challenges with the delivery of these offshore-wind projects – including securing a grid connection – that could threaten delivery before 2030.
Writing on LinkedIn, Bertalan Gyenes, consultant at LCP Delta, says that with a third of the new capacity set to deliver before 2030, a “swiftly delivered and ambitious [allocation round eight] would put DESNZ within touching distance of its targets”. However, he adds:
“The job is not over yet, the windfarms need to be connected, the network upgraded, consenting pipelines de-clogged – there can be no more delays and certainly no cancellations like what we had seen with Hornsea 4 after last year’s auction.”
McIver wrote on LinkedIn that the auction result “takes us into the goldilocks zone that just about keeps CP30 targets alive, if AR8 can similarly deliver”. He added:
“OK, looking at delivery years [for the contracted projects], maybe we’re aiming for roughly CP33 [clean power by 2033] now? Maybe that would be no bad thing.”
Within the briefing for journalists, Stark highlighted a number of steps undertaken by the government over the past 18 months to ease the challenges around the expansion of the renewable energy sector.
This includes removing “zombie projects” from the queue for connecting projects to the electricity network and announcing £28bn in investment for gas and electricity grids.
As such, the auction results fit within a “host of policies” designed to make the ambitious clean power by 2030 target possible, said Stark.
The second half of the CfD results, covering technologies such as onshore wind and solar, are expected out next month. DESNZ’s action plan set a range of 27-29GW and 45-47GW of capacity for the two technologies, respectively, if the country is to meet its 2030 clean-power target.
The post Q&A: What UK’s record auction for offshore wind means for bills and clean power by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What UK’s record auction for offshore wind means for bills and clean power by 2030
Environmental issues including climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss have dropped down an international ranking of short-term concerns for high-profile business leaders, academics and politicians.
Each year in August and September, the Global Risks Perception Survey run by the World Economic Forum (WEF) asks more than 1,300 experts – largely from the Global North – what they are most worried about. It is released in the run-up to an annual gathering of leaders in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, which takes place next week.
This year, the number of respondents citing environmental issues as top concerns over the next two years fell, while more warned of economic risks like geoeconomic confrontation, economic downturn, inflation and asset bubbles bursting.
The report on the survey’s results said that “environmental concerns, especially in the short term, are slipping down the ranking of leading risks for the first time in many years”.
After months of announcements on new US tariffs and sanctions under President Donald Trump, “geoeconomic confrontation” shot from third to first on the list of concerns, leapfrogging “extreme weather events”. This year’s survey found respondents generally more worried about the state of the world than last year.
Commenting on the report, climate scientist Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told Climate Home News “priorities shift but it doesn’t mean that they’re not interconnected”. He said recent trends like a retreat from multilateralism and the rise of misinformation interact with the climate crisis, as do the solutions to these problems.
He noted, for example, that a healthier online environment for public debate and less polarisation helps efforts to tackle climate change. “Aiming to reduce inequality also means providing energy in the cheapest way possible – and that’s with renewables. Governing well in a time of risk means you need to be able to be clear-eyed about what choices are going to bring about the most benefits,” he added.
Looking further ahead, survey respondents still put environmental concerns at the top of their list of longer-term concerns. Over the next ten years, their top concerns were extreme weather followed by biodiversity loss and critical changes to Earth systems.
Report author Saadia Zahidi told a press conference it is “very concerning that if we do lose the focus on [climate change and biodiversity loss] in the short term, we’re not going to be ready to adapt and mitigate 10 years out. So while it does show up in the longer-term rankings higher, it actually is a here-and-now risk.”
Scientists announced this week that the last three years have been the warmest on record and, in 2025, the head of the United Nations accepted that exceeding the goal of limiting global warming to to 1.5C, set in the Paris Agreement, was inevitable.
Despite rising impacts from climate change, a study by the Media and Climate Change Observatory found that media coverage of climate change was far lower in 2025 than previous years, having peaked in 2021-2023.
Trump takes over
The WEF’s annual Davos meeting kicks off on Monday, with political opponents of climate action attending in force. The US government will send what WEF organiser Børge Brende described as the largest US delegation ever, including President Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
Brende said he was “pleased to welcome back” Trump after a six-year absence from Davos, adding that there will also be a “very strong delegation” from Saudi Arabia. Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who has flirted with leaving the Paris Agreement, will give a special address.
On the other hand, politicians supportive of climate action including Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva and former US Vice-President Al Gore will speak on panels, as will Rockström and green Australian businessman Andrew Forrest.
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In November, the Financial Times reported that, in order to persuade Trump to attend, WEF organisers gave assurances that “woke” topics like climate change and international development finance would not be too prominent at the forum.
Nonetheless, climate issues remain on the agenda although several panels are framed as questions that cast doubt on the clean energy transition such as “can EVs [electric vehicles] really dominate?” and “unstoppable march of renewables?”.
Last year’s programme featured a “road to COP30” event but there is no COP31-focused event this time. One panel on this year’s agenda will discuss “should we bet on climate moonshots?” such as nuclear fusion, an unproven clean energy technology on which the Trump administration has funded research.
As well as panel events, which are broadcast to the public online, WEF usually organises informal discussions on a range of issues including climate change.
Many of the high-profile participants travel to Davos by private jet, however, drawing accusations of hypocrisy from Greenpeace. On Thursday, it released figures showing that private jet flights to the annual WEF meeting tripled between 2023 and 2025.
“It’s pure hypocrisy that the world’s most powerful and super-rich elite discuss global challenges and progress in Davos, while they literally burn the planet with the emissions of their private jets,” said Greenpeace transport campaigner Herwig Schuster.
The post Ahead of Davos, climate drops down global elite’s list of pressing concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
Ahead of Davos, climate drops down global elite’s list of pressing concerns
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