The amount of foreign aid the UK spends on climate action reached a record high of around £3bn last year, according to government figures obtained by Carbon Brief.
However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that more than £500m of this sum comes from controversial changes in the way the UK calculates its climate aid for developing countries.
By leaning on private-sector investment and including existing aid projects in the total, the government is able to inflate its figures without providing as much new climate funding.
Including this money puts the UK on track for its five-year goal of providing £11.6bn by 2026 to support climate action in developing countries, even as it cuts the overall aid budget.
Climate aid – which is often referred to as “international climate finance” (ICF) – will likely still need to rise above £3bn in 2025, if the UK is to achieve its target over the next year.
The new data, released to Carbon Brief via freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, covers provisional 2024-25 spending across the three major government departments that fund climate projects overseas.
This analysis is the latest in a series of articles by Carbon Brief documenting the UK’s ICF contributions since 2011.
Key findings from the most recent year include:
- By far the largest payment last year was a £482.3m contribution to boost British International Investment’s (BII) private-sector interests in developing countries.
- Ethiopia was the largest recipient of bilateral climate finance (£92.3m). Other major recipients include Pakistan (£55.8m), Afghanistan (£43.7m) and Sudan (£41.1m).
- The biggest single project to receive funding was a World Bank initiative helping developing countries to sell carbon offsets, which received £153.9m.
- Large portions of climate finance also went to the Green Climate Fund (£227m) and the Global Environment Facility (£64.8m).
- Without the government’s changes, which mimic the looser accounting used by some other countries, climate finance would have needed to increase 78% this year. With the changes, climate finance only has to increase by 2%.
- Around £1.3bn – nearly a sixth of the UK’s ICF over the past four years – can be linked to the government’s accounting changes.
Target achieved?
After it was elected last year, Labour confirmed that it would honour the previous government’s pledge to provide £11.6bn of climate finance over the five-year period ending in 2025-26.
This money is the UK’s contribution, under the Paris Agreement, to help developing countries cut emissions and protect themselves from the threat of climate change.
Since the goal was first announced in 2019, experts have regularly voiced doubts that it can be achieved due to major cuts to the foreign-aid budget by successive governments.
More uncertainty followed the announcement in February that the Labour government would cut aid further – from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% – ostensibly to fund defence spending. (The government insisted that the remaining aid would “prioritise” climate.)
Despite these changes and uncertainty, the figures provided to Carbon Brief via FOI reveal that the UK is, in fact, on track to meet its £11.6bn target.
Climate-finance spending reached a record high of just under £3bn in the financial year 2024-25, more than £700m higher than the previous year.
(Note that these figures are “provisional” and subject to revision. Due to methodology changes, the final figures for UK climate finance in 2023-24 were much higher than those provided to Carbon Brief via a previous FOI. See the Methodology for more details.)
Assuming the provisional figures for 2024-25 are accurate, the UK would still need to raise its climate finance to £3.1bn in 2025-26 in order to meet the £11.6bn target, as shown in the figure below.
This level of climate finance would need to be maintained, even as the government scales back its overall aid budget in 2025.
When asked at a recent committee hearing whether there would be any new money for the £11.6bn goal, international development minister Baroness Chapman spoke frankly:
“I think the search for new money at the moment is going to be pretty fruitless…Is there going to be any new money for climate in a world where we have just gone from 0.5% to 0.3%? I think you can probably work that out.”
Instead of new funding, the upward trajectory of climate aid has been largely driven by the UK expanding what it counts towards the total. These changes were initially made under the Conservatives, but Labour has retained them.
By relabelling existing funding for multilateral development banks (MDBs), humanitarian aid and private-sector investments via BII as “climate finance”, the UK has inflated the figures without allocating genuinely new funds, making the £11.6bn goal easier to achieve.
Based on data acquired through successive FOIs, Carbon Brief estimates that £528m, or 18% of climate finance provided in 2024-25, can be linked to these accounting changes.
Since 2021, the running total of climate finance resulting from these changes is more than £1.3bn, Carbon Brief analysis suggests, amounting to nearly a sixth of spending to date.
Experts have pointed out that this amounts to a real-world cut in climate aid, as it means less additional funding than was originally pledged.
Without the accounting changes, UK climate finance would only have reached around £2.5bn last year, as the chart below shows.
To achieve the £11.6bn goal from this position, climate finance would have needed to increase by 78% this year, nearly doubling from a year earlier. In comparison, the accounting changes mean it only has to increase by 2%.
The government says that its accounting changes merely brought it in line with other countries. A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) spokesperson tells Carbon Brief:
“We will continue to account for all of our international climate finance using internationally agreed OECD guidelines. Meeting our £11.6bn commitment by March 2026 remains our ambition and it is only right that we accurately reflect the funding going to support this aim.”
In response, NGOs and aid experts have argued the UK should have retained its former position as a leader in climate-finance accounting standards, rather than aligning with the looser methodologies used by many others, such as Germany and France.
Moreover, the £11.6bn goal was meant to be a doubling of the government’s previous £5.8bn target, which was based on the original accounting methodology. If the previous target had also been based on a broader definition of climate aid, then the current £11.6bn target would have needed to be higher to represent a doubling.
As the UK nears the end of its third five-year ICF target, it is expected to announce another goal covering the period 2026-27 onwards. This will feed into the $300bn global climate finance target that nations agreed at the COP29 climate summit last year.
Amid the aid cuts, climate NGOs say that the accounting changes should be reversed and the UK should turn to “polluter-pays” measures to generate the required public funds. Catherine Pettengell, executive director of Climate Action Network UK, tells Carbon Brief:
“Our main concern is that we now have the spending review, but there is still no clarity – or vision – on current or future climate finance from the UK.”
Big investments
The UK is now leaning heavily on private-sector investments to achieve its climate-finance goals, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.
By far the largest climate-finance input last year was a £482m contribution to the UK’s development finance institution, BII.
This is the biggest climate-finance contribution the UK has ever made in a single year, according to the data that Carbon Brief has collected in recent years.
It also amounted to nearly a fifth of the total climate finance last year and almost three times more than the UK has ever channelled into BII before.
BII is a publicly owned, for-profit company that largely supports itself with its £7.3bn portfolio of investments in developing countries, but it also receives regular injections of aid money.
The surge in BII climate finance last year can be attributed to two things.
First, the government now counts more of its BII investments as climate finance than it did previously, following the accounting changes. It argues that this more accurately reflects BII’s expanding focus on investing in clean-energy projects overseas.
The government also decided to invest an extra £400m – largely from underspending on housing asylum seekers in the UK – into BII, bringing its total budget for the year up to £881m.
Prior to these changes, the government expected BII climate finance to be worth £126m in 2024-25, according to forecasts previously obtained by Carbon Brief.
It has, therefore, added an extra £356m to BII’s contribution. Carbon Brief estimates that £218m of this can be attributed to the accounting changes, rather than the increase in funding. (See: Methodology.)
Critics argue that BII, which focuses on loans and equity finance rather than grants, is not capable of supporting climate action in the poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations. (Separately, it has also been criticised for continuing to support fossil-fuel developments.)
Last week’s spending review provided the FCDO with at least £300m annually out to 2029-30 for BII and similar organisations, even as billions are cut from its aid budget. In this context, Ian Mitchell, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, tells Carbon Brief:
“BII looks set to become the government’s main climate-finance vehicle. Though, whether this is compatible with its historic focus on Africa and the poorest countries remains to be seen.”
Meanwhile, the biggest single project to receive funding from the UK last year was the World Bank initiative titled: “Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions (SCALE).” The government provided it with an initial contribution of £154m.
SCALE aims to help around 20 countries generate carbon credits that can be sold by companies on the voluntary offset market or internationally via Article 6 carbon markets.
According to the UK government, one aim is to “maximise the mobilisation of additional finance through the sale of carbon credits”.
Selling carbon offsets has long been touted as a way to channel climate finance into developing countries, but the practice has faced intense scrutiny and accusations of “greenwashing” in recent years.
Accounting changes
Other large portions of funding in the UK’s 2024-25 climate-finance budget can also be attributed to changes in the government’s accounting methodology.
For example, as of 2023, the UK started counting portions of its “core” payments into MDBs as climate finance, significantly inflating its climate-aid total.
This money is used by the banks to issue loans and – to a lesser extent – grants for projects in developing countries. While many of these projects will be climate-related, relabelling some of the UK’s contributions as “climate finance” does not result in any additional funds being distributed.
In 2024-25, this relabelling accounted for at least £103m of the total climate finance, including £84m for the African Development Bank (AfDB), £11m for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and £8m for the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Special Development Fund.
In terms of bilateral aid from the UK, several of the projects with the largest share of climate finance last year were in nations facing war, famine and natural disasters.
This can partly be attributed to accounting changes that mean 30% of all humanitarian funding in the most climate-vulnerable countries – including Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia – is now automatically counted as climate finance within government accounting.
Some of these nations have, therefore, risen to be top recipients of bilateral “climate aid” from the UK – as shown in the figure below – through programmes such as Sudan Humanitarian Preparedness and Response.
(Such programmes tend to involve the UK supporting NGOs rather than providing funds to governments. For example, FCDO has two “flagship” humanitarian programmes in Afghanistan – both with an ICF component – but does not provide funds to the Taliban.)
This accounting change was viewed by the previous Conservative government as a way to avoid a “trade-off” between climate and humanitarian projects, amid aid budget cuts.
As the map above shows, Ethiopia remained the largest recipient of UK climate finance via single-country projects last year, with £92.3m in total. This has been the case for more than a decade.
The finance largely comes from two programmes, which aim to improve climate resilience in regions of Ethiopia that have been afflicted by drought and flooding. The country has faced years of regional conflicts that have been exacerbated by climate shocks.
Rather than directly supporting individual projects in individual countries, most UK climate finance is distributed to international bodies and initiatives that serve many countries.
Some of the biggest payments are to well-established international grant providers. These include £227m for the Green Climate Fund, £64m for the Global Environment Facility and £26m for the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF).
Other large payments went to long-running initiatives to help “build financial markets and institutions” in Africa and “mobilise private investment in infrastructure” in developing countries.
Methodology
This analysis is the latest part of Carbon Brief’s efforts to assess the UK’s ICF contributions by financial year. Detailed data underpinning these contributions is not released publicly, but is required to track progress towards the UK’s ICF targets.
Total ICF figures for the years 2011-12 to 2023-24 are based on summary public statements made by the government. Ministers have quoted different figures on different occasions, but Carbon Brief is using a March statement from FCDO minister Stephen Doughty for the 2011-12 to 2023-24 period, as this is understood to be the most up-to-date.
The figures for 2024-25 are based on FOI responses from the three major departments responsible for the UK’s overseas climate-related aid projects: FCDO, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Around 80% of climate finance provided by the UK is overseen by the FCDO.
All three of these departments provided the data for 2024-25, stressing that it is provisional. This means it is “subject to year-end accounting and audit adjustments, which are still being processed”. Carbon Brief also received the final (i.e. non-provisional) figures for 2023-24, having been given the provisional figures last year.
(The provisional figures released to Carbon Brief in 2023-24 last year were significantly lower than the final figures – amounting to £1.8bn rather than £2.3bn. This is almost entirely due to the provisional data not factoring in most of the accounting methodology changes described in this article. The provisional figures for 2024-25 appear to have factored in these methodology changes already.)
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) also oversees a small number of ICF projects overseas. Unlike the other departments, DSIT rejected Carbon Brief’s FOI requests. Carbon Brief understands that its projects were worth £42m in 2023-24, roughly 1% of the total. For the sake of this analysis, Carbon Brief assumes that this amount remained the same in 2024-25.
Carbon Brief relied on previous FOI results to calculate how much of the UK’s climate finance derives from accounting changes in recent years:
- BII: According to an internal document, under its old methodology, the government originally forecast 30% of BII core capital to be climate finance in 2024-25, amounting to £126m. The final figure provided to Carbon Brief, which is also based on a higher core capital figure, is £482m. If the government had counted 30% of the higher core capital contribution as ICF, under its old methodology, the total would be £264.3. This suggests the remaining £218m of the £482m could be attributed to the methodology changes.
- MDBs: The FOI results provided to Carbon Brief show contributions to the AfDB, ADB and CDB amounting to £103m.
- Humanitarian projects: Carbon Brief has used the estimates from an internal document showing how much climate finance the government expects humanitarian aid projects to provide, including £69m in 2024-25. This may be an underestimate, as some of the projects listed in this document have higher ICF totals in the new FOI data released to Carbon Brief.
- “Scrubbed” projects: The government also asked civil servants to reappraise the existing aid portfolio in order to identify any extra ICF that could be counted. Carbon Brief has obtained an incomplete list of these projects, which states that £138m was added to the 2024-25 total in this way.
Together, these changes add up to £528m. The actual figure may be higher, as these are provisional figures.
Carbon Brief’s estimate of the cumulative impact of the accounting changes by 2024-25 – some £1.3bn – aligns with an estimate of £1.72bn for the entire five-year period out to 2025-26, made by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI). The final figure may be higher, as ICAI’s calculation was based on government documents that did not, for example, include the increased capital contribution to BII in 2024-25.
The post Analysis: UK climate aid to hit £11.6bn goal – but only due to accounting rule change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK climate aid to hit £11.6bn goal – but only due to accounting rule change
Climate Change
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
The country’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas benefited from what critics say is a questionable IRS interpretation of tax credits.
Cheniere Energy, the largest producer and exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas, received $370 million from the IRS in the first quarter of 2026, a payout that shipping experts, tax specialists and a U.S. senator say the company never should have received.
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
Climate Change
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
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 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Seven Pacific island nations say they will demand heftier levies on global shipping emissions if opponents of a green deal for the industry succeed in reopening negotiations on the stalled accord.
The United States and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to grant final approval to the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in October and they are now leading a drive for changes to the deal.
In a joint submission seen by Climate Home News, the seven climate-vulnerable Pacific countries said the framework was already a “fragile compromise”, and vowed to push for a universal levy on all ship emissions, as well as higher fees . The deal currently stipulates that fees will be charged when a vessel’s emissions exceed a certain level.
“For many countries, the NZF represents the absolute limit of what they can accept,” said the unpublished submission by Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.
The countries said a universal levy and higher charges on shipping would raise more funds to enable a “just and equitable transition leaving no country behind”. They added, however, that “despite its many shortcomings”, the framework should be adopted later this year.
US allies want exemption for ‘transition fuels’
The previous attempt to adopt the framework failed after governments narrowly voted to postpone it by a year. Ahead of the vote, the US threatened governments and their officials with sanctions, tariffs and visa restrictions – and President Donald Trump called the framework a “Green New Scam Tax on Shipping”.
Since then, Liberia – an African nation with a major low-tax shipping registry headquartered in the US state of Virginia – has proposed a new measure under which, rather than staying fixed under the NZF, ships’ emissions intensity targets change depending on “demonstrated uptake” of both “low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels”.
The proposal places stringent conditions on what fuels are taken into consideration when setting these targets, stressing that the low- and zero-carbon fuels should be “scalable”, not cost more than 15% more than standard marine fuels and should be available at “sufficient ports worldwide”.
This proposal would not “penalise transitional fuels” like natural gas and biofuels, they said. In the last decade, the US has built a host of large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, which the Trump administration is lobbying other countries to purchase from.
The draft motion, seen by Climate Home News, was co-sponsored by US ally Argentina and also by Panama, a shipping hub whose canal the US has threatened to annex. Both countries voted with the US to postpone the last vote on adopting the framework.
-
IMO head: Shipping decarbonisation “has started” despite green deal delay
Arsenio Dominguez said the shipping industry’s net zero emissions goal is not in dispute although countries have stalled on adopting a framework to reach it -
US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal
The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned
The IMO’s Panamanian head Arsenio Dominguez told reporters in January that changes to the framework were now possible.
“It is clear from what happened last year that we need to look into the concerns that have been expressed [and] … make sure that they are somehow addressed within the framework,” he said.
Patchwork of levies
While the European Union pushed firmly for the framework’s adoption, two of its shipping-reliant member states – Greece and Cyprus – abstained in October’s vote.
After a meeting between the Greek shipping minister and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister in January, Greece said a “common position” united Greece, Saudi Arabia and the US on the framework.
If the NZF or a similar instrument is not adopted, the IMO has warned that there will be a patchwork of differing regional levies on pollution – like the EU’s emissions trading system for ships visiting its ports – which will be complicated and expensive to comply with.
This would mean that only countries with their own levies and with lots of ships visiting their ports would raise funds, making it harder for other nations to fund green investments in their ports, seafarers and shipping companies. In contrast, under the NZF, revenues would be disbursed by the IMO to all nations based on set criteria.
Anais Rios, shipping policy officer from green campaign group Seas At Risk, told Climate Home News the proposal by the Pacific nations for a levy on all shipping emissions – not just those above a certain threshold – was “the most credible way to meet the IMO’s climate goals”.
“With geopolitics reframing climate policy, asking the IMO to reopen the discussion on the universal levy is the only way to decarbonise shipping whilst bringing revenue to manage impacts fairly,” Rios said.
“It is […] far stronger than the Net-Zero Framework that is currently on offer.”
The post Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen
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