The UK government’s spending on climate aid reached its highest-ever level last year, with more than £1.8bn channelled into projects aimed at cutting emissions and boosting resilience in developing countries.
The new data, released to Carbon Brief via freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, reveals how “international climate finance” (ICF) was dispersed in the financial year 2023-24. This builds on larger Carbon Brief analysis tracking ICF spending back to 2011.
UK aid money was, for example, used last year to reconstruct low-carbon power supplies in Ukraine, support flood victims in Pakistan and help Ethiopians facing drought. There were also large contributions to international programmes, such as the Green Climate Fund.
However, despite the record sum, Carbon Brief has identified at least £199m – or 11% – of this money as the result of the government loosening its definition of “climate finance”. This allows the UK to meet its climate-aid targets without providing as much new money.
Carbon Brief understands that this figure is likely an underestimate, because the “provisional” figures provided do not include some of the reclassified humanitarian aid identified in internal documents revealed by a previous FOI request.
Climate finance will be the critical issue at the COP29 UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, later this year. Rich nations are under pressure to increase their overseas climate spending despite many, including the UK, drastically cutting their aid budgets.
Yet, with a general election on the horizon, neither the Conservatives nor their Labour opposition have expressed interest in returning the UK’s aid spending to its previous levels, for the time being.
New record
In 2019 the UK government, led by then-prime minister Boris Johnson, committed to spending £11.6bn on ICF between the financial years of 2021-22 and 2025-26.
This money is the UK’s contribution towards a broader Paris Agreement commitment by developed countries to provide financial support for climate action in developing countries.
Current prime minister Rishi Sunak has reaffirmed this pledge, stating that it is the “right thing to do”. Yet the target has come under considerable strain during his leadership.
In his role as chancellor in Johnson’s government, Sunak announced major cuts to the foreign aid budget – breaching a legal obligation. The government has spent much of the remaining budget on housing refugees, making it even harder to scale up climate spending.
Towards the end of 2023, the government announced that it was broadening its definition of “climate finance”. This allows the UK to stay on track for its pledges without providing as much new money. (See: Accounting changes.)
However, the trajectory the government mapped out to reach £11.6bn still requires annual spending to more than double within five years.
According to the annual figures provided to Carbon Brief, ICF spending reached at least £1.82bn in 2023-24 – an increase of £192m since the previous year. As the chart below shows, this suggests that the UK’s ICF spending will still have to increase significantly over the next two years to stay on track for the £11.6bn goal.
These figures are based on FOI responses from the three major departments responsible for the UK’s overseas climate-related development projects: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO); the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). The FCDO is by far the largest contributor, with responsibility for 79% of the ICF spending.
In fact, the total ICF spend in 2023-24 is likely to be at least a little higher than the £1.82bn suggested by the FOI data. According to the government, these numbers are “provisional” and “subject to year-end accounting and audit adjustments”.
This could explain why many of the humanitarian aid projects that were recently reclassified as ICF – as per a previous FOI request by Carbon Brief – do not appear in the data. If these projects are included, they could add tens of millions to the total.
Moreover, Carbon Brief has not been able to obtain data on a handful of “research and innovation” projects that support scientific research in developing countries, which have recently been transferred from DESNZ to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT).
Last year, these projects contributed £7.77m in ICF – amounting to around 0.4% of that year’s total. (Carbon Brief has asked DSIT and FCDO about these projects, but had not received a response at the time of publication.)
Accounting changes
The government has described the £11.6bn goal as “dedicated ring-fenced funding that is distinguishable from non-climate [aid]”. This aligns with the widely held notion that climate finance should be “new and additional”, namely, on top of existing aid programmes.
Nevertheless, in October 2023, the government made three major changes to its ICF accounting in order to inflate its overseas climate spending figures.
The biggest change was including a cut of “core” UK contributions to development banks, such as the World Bank. It also increased the share of British International Investment (BII) input – through which the UK invests in overseas businesses – that counts as ICF.
The third change was labelling 30% of all humanitarian aid provided to the most climate-vulnerable nations as ICF. This applies even if a project has no explicit link to climate action.
In addition, civil servants were tasked with “scrubbing” existing aid projects for any other money that could be counted as ICF, in order to increase the numbers further.
FOI documents released to Carbon Brief earlier this year revealed the details of £1.7bn in funds that the government planned to reclassify as ICF between 2021-22 and 2025-26.
The new data for 2023-24 confirms some of these details. Carbon Brief has identified at least £199m, including funds confirmed separately from the FOI request, which can be attributed to these changes in that year. These figures are “provisional” and may not account for all the changes that have taken place.
The FOI data includes £153.5m that was provided to the BII “programme of support” for companies in Africa, south Asia, the Indo-Pacific region and the Caribbean. Based on a comparison with previously obtained documents, this suggests the UK counted an additional £69.5m of BII investment as ICF in 2023-24, compared to its pre-revision plans for the year.
Carbon Brief could only identify three purely humanitarian projects, contributing a relatively small £4.5m of ICF in 2023-24. This is far less than the £74m identified in government planning documents, previously released to Carbon Brief.
A notable omission from the FOI data is any new funding for multilateral development banks (MDBs), which is expected to make up the biggest chunk of the recently reassigned ICF.
However, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) confirmed to Carbon Brief that, in fact, some MDB funding was included in the UK’s ICF totals last year. Specifically, £48m of contributions to the 16th “replenishment” of the African Development Fund – part of the African Development Bank – has been classed as ICF.
ICAI has also previously confirmed that, according to an internal government document, £77m was “scrubbed” from existing funds and added to the 2023-24 total. (Carbon Brief was not able to identify which projects these came from, based on the FOI response.)
The government has previously argued that their changes to ICF accounting are in line with the methodologies used by other wealthy countries. In response, development experts have said that the UK should be upholding high standards, rather than lowering them to align with others.
At COP29 in November, rich countries will be under pressure to increase the amount of climate finance they provide to developing countries, in particular via a mechanism known as the “new collective quantified goal”. There will also be discussions at the summit in Azerbaijan of establishing tighter guidelines for what counts as climate finance.
With the UK general election taking place next month and Sunak’s Conservative government likely to lose power, the current polling suggests that the opposition Labour party will be leading the country during the key climate finance discussions at COP29.
Labour has not committed to restoring the UK’s foreign aid budget to its former level, in the short term, and neither has it explicitly committed to maintaining the £11.6bn target.
Major recipients
For the first time in the history of the UK’s ICF programme, the government directly contributed climate aid to Ukraine in 2023-24, as part of a wider package to support the war-torn nation.
The UK committed £12.9m of bilateral climate funds towards the Ukraine Resilience and Energy Security Programme – part of a wider £62m package of grants out to the end of 2025 to ensure the “continued operation of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure”.
The first stages of the project focused on immediate repairs and maintenance of the country’s gas and electricity system, including the provision of fossil-fuel generators.
However, the project is also focusing on “pivot[ing] towards rehabilitating infrastructure in a green and energy efficient manner”. This includes money to support renewables, green hydrogen and insulation for homes.
The only country that received more direct, country-to-country ICF funds from the UK last year than Ukraine was Ethiopia. It received £36.8m in bilateral funds, meaning it retains its long-running position as the biggest single-country recipient of UK climate finance.
The east African nation has also been facing significant instability over the past year, as conflict continues following war in the northern Tigray region. Meanwhile, swathes of the country have been struggling with climate change-driven drought.
As the map below shows, much of the remaining bilateral ICF last year went to former colonies in Africa and south Asia, with which the UK continues to foster close relationships. Of the top 10 recipients, seven are members of the Commonwealth association of nations.
Other notable single-country ICF beneficiaries include Pakistan, which received £10m – including £3.3m to help build climate resilience for communities struck by devastating, climate change-driven floods.
Kenya was also a key recipient, with £10.5m to support climate-resilient cities and provide cash transfers to people in drought-affected areas.
Most of the UK’s biggest contributions were to well-established multilateral climate funds and schemes, including a £411m contribution to the first replenishment of the Green Climate Fund. This alone was roughly a quarter of all the climate finance provided last year.
Other major contributions to international efforts in 2023/2024 included a £134.4m injection into the eighth replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and £44.1m for the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Resilience and Sustainability Trust. The latter is a recently established vehicle for lending to help developing countries prepare for crises.
Developing countries say they need trillions of dollars in annual support to achieve their climate targets under the Paris Agreement, with a preference for grant-based finance. Some wealthy countries have argued that such levels of funding are only possible if a wider selection of countries contribute and there is more emphasis on private-sector funding.
All of these issues will come to a head at COP29 in November, where countries will decide how best to mobilise climate finance in the coming years.
The post Analysis: UK climate aid reaches record £1.8bn in 2023 after loosening rules appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK climate aid reaches record £1.8bn in 2023 after loosening rules
Colombia wants countries to discuss options for a global agreement to ensure that the extraction, processing and recycling of minerals – including those needed for the clean energy transition – don’t harm the environment and human wellbeing.
The mineral-rich nation is proposing to create an expert group to “identify options for international instruments, including global and legally-binding instruments, for coordinated global action on the environmentally sound management of minerals and metals through [their] full lifecyle”.
Colombia hopes this will eventually lead to an agreement on the need for an international treaty to define mandatory rules and standards that would make mineral value chains more transparent and accountable.
The proposal was set out in a draft resolution submitted to the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) earlier this week and seen by Climate Home News. UNEA, which is constituted of all UN member states, is the world’s top decision-making body for matters relating to the environment. The assembly’s seventh session will meet in Kenya in December to vote on countries’ proposals.
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Soaring demand for the minerals used to manufacture clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, as well as in the digital, construction and defence industries have led to growing environmental destruction, human rights violations and social conflict.
Colombia argues there is an “urgent need” to strengthen global cooperation and governance to reduce the risks to people and the planet.
Options for a global minerals agreement
The proposal is among a flurry of initiatives to strength global mineral governance at a time when booming demand is putting pressure on new mining projects.
Colombia, which produces emeralds, gold, platinum and silver for exports, first proposed the idea for a binding international agreement on minerals traceability and accountability on the sidelines of the UN biodiversity talks it hosted in October 2024.
Since then, the South American nation has been quietly trying to drum up support for the idea, especially among African and European nations.
Its draft resolution to UNEA7 contains very few details, leaving it open for countries to discuss what kind of global instrument would be best suited to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable.
Does the world need a global treaty on energy transition minerals?
Colombia says it wants the expert group to build on other UN initiatives, including a UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, which set out seven principles to ensure the mining, processing and recycling of energy transition minerals are done responsibly and benefit everyone.
The group would include technical experts and representatives from international and regional conventions, major country groupings as well as relevant stakeholders.
It would examine the feasibility and effectiveness of different options for a global agreement, consider their costs and identify measures to support countries to implement what is agreed.
The resolution also calls for one or two meetings for member states to discuss the idea before the UNEA8 session planned in late 2027, when countries would decide on a way forward.
No time to lose for treaty negotiations
Colombia’s efforts to advance global talks on mineral supply chains have been welcomed by resource experts and campaigners. But not everyone agrees on the best strategy to move the discussion forward at a time when multilateralism is coming under attack.
Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, said she had hoped that the resolution would explicitly call for negotiations to begin on an international minerals treaty.
“Treaty negotiations take a long time. If you don’t even start with it now, it will take even longer. I don’t see how in two or three years it will be easier to come to an agreement,” she told Climate Home.
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Despite the geopolitical challenges, “we need joint rules to prevent a huge race to the bottom for [mineral] standards”. That could start with a group of countries coming together and starting to enforce joint standards for mining, processing and recycling minerals, she said.
But any meaningful global agreement on mineral supply chains would require backing from China, the world’s largest processor of minerals, which dominates most of the supply chains. And with Colombia heading for an election in May, it will need all the support it can get to move its proposal forward.
‘Voluntary initiative won’t cut it’
Juliana Peña Niño, Colombia country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, is more optimistic. “Colombia’s leadership towards fairer mineral value chains is a welcome step,” she told Climate Home News.
“At UNEA7, we need an ambitious debate that gives the proposed expert group a clear mandate to advance concrete next steps — not delay decisions — and that puts the voices of those most affected at the centre. One thing is clear: the path forward must ultimately deliver a binding instrument, as yet another voluntary initiative simply won’t cut it,” she said.
More than 50 civil society groups spanning Latin America, Africa and Europe previously described Colombia’s work on the issue as “a chance to build a new global paradigm rooted in environmental integrity, human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, justice and equity”.
“As the energy transition and digitalisation drive demand for minerals, we cannot afford to repeat old extractive models built on asymmetry – we must redefine them,” they wrote in a statement.
Main image: The UN Environment Assembly is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. (Natalia Mroz/ UN Environment)
The post Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement
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Climate Change
DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Shattered climate consensus
FRACKING BAN: UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has announced that the government will bring forward its plans to permanently ban fracking, in a move designed to counter a promise from the hard-right Reform party to restart efforts to introduce the practice, the Guardian said. In the same speech, Miliband said Reform’s plans to scrap clean-energy projects would “betray” young people and future generations, the Press Association reported.
ACT AXE?: Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged to scrap the 2008 Climate Change Act if elected, Bloomberg reported. It noted that the legislation was passed with cross-party support and strengthened by the Conservatives.
‘INSANE’: Badenoch faced a backlash from senior Tory figures, including ex-prime minister Theresa May, who called her pledge a “catastrophic mistake”, said the Financial Times. The newspaper added that the Conservatives were “trailing third in opinion polls”. A wide range of climate scientists also condemned the idea, describing it as “insane”, an “insult” and a “serious regression”.
Around the world
- CLIMATE CRACKDOWN: The US Department of Energy has told employees in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to avoid using the term “climate change”, according to the Guardian.
- FOREST DELAY: Plans for Brazil’s COP30 flagship initiative, the tropical forests forever fund, are “suffer[ing] delays” as officials remain split on key details, Bloomberg said.
- COP MAY BE ‘SPLIT’: Australia could “split” the hosting of the COP31 climate summit in 2026 under a potential compromise with Turkey, reported the Guardian.
- DIVINE INTERVENTION: Pope Leo XIV has criticised those who minimise the “increasingly evident” impact of global warming in his first major climate speech, BBC News reported.
€44.5 billion
The cost of extreme weather and climate change in the EU in the last four years – two-and-a-half times higher than in the decade to 2019, according to a European Environment Agency report covered by the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- Fossil-fuelled climate change caused around 36% of Typhoon Ragasa’s direct damage to homes and properties in southern China, according to a rapid impact attribution study | Imperial Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment
- Some 86% of the global population are concerned about climate change, according to a survey of 280,000 people in 142 countries and regions | Climate Policy
- A global shift towards a “planetary health diet” could slash emissions and save tens of thousands of lives each day | EAT-Lancet Commission 2025 report
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Clean energy has met 100% of Great Britain’s electricity demand for a record 87 hours this year so far, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This is up from just 2.5 hours in 2021 and 64.5 hours in all of 2024. The longest stretch of time where 100% of electricity demand was met by clean energy stands at 15 hours, from midnight on 25 May 2025 through to 3pm on 26 May, according to the analysis.
Spotlight
‘Overshoot’ unknowns
As the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5C dwindle, there is increasing focus on the prospects for “overshooting” the Paris Agreement target and then bringing temperatures back down by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
At the first-ever Overshoot Conference in Laxenburg, Austria, Carbon Brief asks experts about the key unknowns around warming “overshoot”.
Sir Prof Jim Skea
Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and emeritus professor at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy
So there are huge knowledge gaps around overshoot and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). As it’s very clear from the themes of this conference, we don’t altogether understand how the Earth would react in taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
We don’t understand the nature of the irreversibilities and we don’t understand the effectiveness of CDR techniques, which might themselves be influenced by the level of global warming, plus all the equity and sustainability issues surrounding using CDR techniques.
Prof Kristie Ebi
Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment
There are all kinds of questions about adaptation and how to approach effective adaptation. At the moment, adaptation is primarily assuming a continual increase in global mean surface temperature. If there is going to be a peak – and of course, we don’t know what that peak is – then how do you start planning? Do you change your planning?
There are places, for instance when thinking about hard infrastructure, [where overshoot] may result in a change in your plan – because as you come down the backside, maybe the need would be less. For example, when building a bridge taller. And when implementing early warning systems, how do you take into account that there will be a peak and ultimately a decline? There is almost no work in that. I would say that’s one of the critical unknowns.
Dr James Fletcher
Former minister for public service, sustainable development, energy, science and technology for Saint Lucia and negotiator at COP21 in Paris.
The key unknown is where we’re going to land. At what point will we peak [temperatures] before we start going down and how long will we stay in that overshoot period? That is a scary thing. Yes, there will be overshoot, but at what point will that overshoot peak? Are we peaking at 1.6C, 1.7C, 2.1C?
All of these are scary scenarios for small island developing states – anything above 1.5C is scary. Every fraction of a degree matters to us. Where we peak is very important and how long we stay in this overshoot period is equally important. That’s when you start getting into very serious, irreversible impacts and tipping points.
Prof Oliver Geden
Senior fellow and head of the climate policy and politics research cluster at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and vice-chair of IPCC Working Group III
[A key unknown] is whether countries are really willing to commit to net-negative trajectories. We are assuming, in science, global pathways going net-negative, with hardly any country saying they want to go there. So maybe it is just an academic thought experiment. So we don’t know yet if [overshoot] is even relevant. It is relevant in the sense that if we do, [the] 1.5C [target] stays on the table. But I think the next phase needs to be that countries – or the UNFCCC as a whole – needs to decide what they want to do.
Prof Lavanya Rajamani
Professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford
I think there are several scientific unknowns, but I would like to focus on the governance unknowns with respect to overshoot. To me, a key governance unknown is the extent to which our current legal and regulatory architecture – across levels of governance, so domestic, regional and international – will actually be responsive to the needs of an overshoot world and the consequences of actually not having regulatory and governance architectures in place to address overshoot.
Watch, read, listen
FUTURE GAZING: The Financial Times examined a “future where China wins the green race”.
‘JUNK CREDITS’: Climate Home News reported on a “forest carbon megaproject” in Zimbabwe that has allegedly “generated millions of junk credits”.
‘SINK OR SWIM’: An extract from a new book on how the world needs to adapt to climate change, by Dr Susannah Fisher, featured in Backchannel.
Coming up
- 7 October: International Energy Agency (IEA) renewables 2025 report launch
- 8-10 October: World summit of Indigenous peoples and nature, Abu Dhabi, UAE
- 9-15 October: International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 2025 congress, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Pick of the jobs
- UK government foreign, commonwealth and development office, senior climate policy adviser | Salary: CA$93,207. Location: Calgary, Canada
- Wellcome Trust, senior research manager, climate and health | Salary: £64,800. Location: London
- Bloomberg, product manager – climate, nature and sustainability regulations | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
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 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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