The UK’s climate-aid spending on “nature protection and restoration” reached record levels of nearly £800m last year, according to government figures obtained by Carbon Brief.
The data suggests the UK is on track to achieve its five-year pledge to provide £3bn in nature-related funds for developing countries by 2026.
Funding for forest protection has also increased, but will need to rise by an additional £100m this year in order to meet the target of £1.5bn, within the £3bn total.
The latest figures, provided to Carbon Brief via freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, include climate-aid contributions to forest-dense regions, from the Amazon to the Congo Basin.
By far the largest slice of last year’s finance – amounting to almost half of forest funds – came from a £153.9m project supporting controversial carbon-offsetting schemes in developing countries.
This is one of the largest donations the UK has made to a nature-and-forests project since 2021, outstripping others that have been underway for years.
Targets on track
The UK has a target to provide £11.6bn in climate finance over a five-year period ending in 2026. This is the nation’s contribution to a wider effort under the Paris Agreement to provide developing countries with funds that help them deal with climate change.
Within this target, the previous government had pledged in 2021 that £3bn would go to projects that “protect and restore nature”. This, in turn, was to include £1.5bn for forest-related projects.
Last year, the Labour government confirmed that it would “continue to honour” these sub-goals, along with the overall £11.6bn target it inherited.
Alongside many other developed countries, however, the UK has announced major cuts to its aid budget in recent years, placing climate-focused spending under pressure.
Nevertheless, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that the country is on track to meet its £11.6bn climate-finance target. This is partly due to accounting changes that have allowed the government to include additional forms of finance in its figures, without committing as much new money.
Government data obtained by Carbon Brief via FOI suggests that the UK is broadly on track to meet its nature-and-forest targets as well.
UK spending on nature-related programmes reached £796.6m in 2024-25, bringing the cumulative total to £2.3bn. This means it would need to spend £684.8m on such projects in 2025-26 to hit the target, as shown in the chart below.
Projects covered by the “nature” target include an initiative tackling water insecurity and pollution in Nepal, support for “climate-smart agriculture” in African countries and a fund aimed at delivering the global target to protect “30% of earth’s land and sea for nature”.
For the forest-finance target, which only covers projects addressing deforestation or forest restoration, spending on relevant projects reached £341.6m in 2024-25. This brings the cumulative figure up to just over £1bn since 2021.
Forest aid would, therefore, need to increase by more than £100m to £466m in 2025-26, in order to meet the £1.5bn goal, as shown in the chart below.
While this is a fairly steep increase, the government’s climate-finance targets were always designed to be backloaded, with more spending planned towards the end of the five-year period.
UK aid spending is set to drop sharply again in 2026-27, beyond the timeframe of current climate-finance goals.
The government has said it will continue to prioritise climate projects, but unpublished analysis of government forecasts by the Center for Global Development (CGD) – shared with Carbon Brief – suggests the departments financing these areas face major cuts.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), provided nearly half of all nature finance in 2024-25. They will see their aid spending drop by 59% and 45%, respectively, in 2026-27, which is a steeper drop than the aid budget as a whole, according to the CGD estimates.
Besides setting climate-finance targets, the UK also has obligations to provide biodiversity finance under the UN’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
In its FOI responses, the government stated that it has not recorded project-level biodiversity-focused spending over the five-year period covered by its climate-finance targets.
However, the government cites the £3bn nature target in its national biodiversity strategy and action plan (NBSAP) as one of the ways the UK is “clos[ing] the global biodiversity finance gap”. This indicates that the money is counted as both climate and biodiversity finance.
Carbon-offsetting
The largest portion of UK nature and forest spending last year was £153.9m from DESNZ for a project called “Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions (SCALE)”.
This World Bank-backed programme funds projects that generate “high-integrity carbon credits” and provides technical assistance to help developing countries trade them.
The carbon credits will be generated via projects that curb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by preserving or restoring forests and other ecosystems. These credits could then be purchased by companies or state actors, which may allow them to comply with climate targets while still producing emissions.
Combined with a smaller associated programme called “EnABLE” – which is designed to ensure that local communities receive benefits from carbon trading – the SCALE initiative made up a fifth of the total nature finance and 45% of forest funding in 2024-25.
(The government acknowledges in its FOI response that, despite counting 100% of the SCALE funding as forest-related, it “may benefit various ecosystems, not just forests”.)
The chart below shows the nature-and-forest projects that received the most funding from the UK in 2024-25, with combined spending on SCALE and EnABLE in the top spot.
Another initiative involving forest-related carbon credits – the Brazilian Amazon Fund – was also one of the top recipients of UK support last year, with £28.5m.
Carbon-offsetting is viewed by many as an important way to encourage external investment in nature protection, particularly for densely forested global-south nations.
Nevertheless, carbon credits, particularly those based on forest conservation, have been dogged by controversies. These range from Indigenous people being driven off their land to companies exaggerating the extent of forest protection and emissions savings.
Sarah Colenbrander, director of the climate and sustainability programme at ODI, tells Carbon Brief that the “risks to nature-based carbon offsets are well-documented”. She adds:
“Carbon and biodiversity markets have a role to play in tackling climate change and nature loss – but it is not obvious that the UK should allocate such large grants to this topic when there are many more proven, cost-effective options to cut emissions and protect the environment.”
The single payment of £153.9m means SCALE and EnABLE have received more money from the UK government than virtually any other nature projects since 2021.
The only larger overall recipients have been multilateral funds such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which tend to be viewed favourably by developing countries.
These funds, which provide grants to developing country applicants, received large contributions from the UK last year of £90.8m and £64.8m, respectively.
When asked about the funding given to SCALE and EnABLE, a government spokesperson stresses the importance of tackling “the existential climate crisis”, adding:
“This includes putting Britain back in the business of climate leadership by supporting the reform of the global financial system and mobilising private finance for nature and to help developing countries accelerate the energy transition.
“This comes on top of working alongside other countries and the EU in the forests and climate leaders’ partnership to drive progress towards halting and reversing forest loss.”
Of the other top projects funded by the UK, some have a clear focus on nature, such as the Darwin Initiative. This project, which received £27.8m in 2024-25, is the “UK’s flagship international challenge fund for biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction”.
For others, nature is not the primary goal. Ethiopia Crises 2 Resilience, which received £24.9m last year, focuses on providing humanitarian relief from war and drought, but its annual review mentions “land treated through area enclosures, rangeland management, soil and water conservation, forage and forestry activities”.
Methodology
The nature-and-forest climate finance figures were provided to Carbon Brief via FOI by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO); the Defra and DESNZ.
The path to the £1.5bn and £3bn targets appears more achievable than it did in Carbon Brief’s previous analysis of nature-and-forests data, as the final 2023-24 figures provided by the government are higher than those obtained last year.
Unlike the other departments, FCDO declined to provide its 2023-24 figures last year, so Carbon Brief estimated the figures based on a dataset containing “provisional” figures for all climate-finance projects that year. However, this resulted in an underestimate, due primarily to larger-than-expected contributions to multilateral funds and banks being counted as nature-related.
Unlike the previous analysis, most of the figures provided via this year’s FOIs are the government’s “final” figures, meaning they are unlikely to change. For 2024-25, only Defra – which was responsible for 17% of nature finance that year – provided “provisional” figures.
The post Analysis: UK foreign aid for nature hits £800m record due to cash for carbon credits appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK foreign aid for nature hits £800m record due to cash for carbon credits
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
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 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Around 300 scientists, civil servants, journalists and climate experts took part in the 11th annual Carbon Brief quiz on Wednesday 18 March 2026.
For the second time, this year’s quiz was hosted by Octopus Energy at its headquarters in central London.
In total, 39 teams participated – 25 teams in person and 14 teams joining via Zoom.
Competing teams reflected a wide range of climate change and energy professionals. The list included journalists, civil servants, climate campaigners, policy advisers, energy experts and scientists.
Organisations represented included: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India; New Scientist; the Times; Business Green; the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), UCL; Verisk Maplecroft; BBC; World Weather Attribution; Grantham Institute at Imperial; DESNZ; WWF; European Climate Foundation (ECF); the ENDS Report; C40 Cities; Ricardo; Met Office; Meliore; E3G; Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI); Energy Transitions Commission; Carbon Tracker; Ember; Royal Meteorological Society; Civil Service Climate and Environment Network (CSCEN); Changing Markets Foundation; Cerulogy; Oxford Sustainable Law Programme; Université de Lausanne; University of Exeter; Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey; UK Parliament; Skeptical Science; ECIU (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit); Octopus Energy; DeSmog; Department for Transport and Royal School of Mines.
Teams were tested with five rounds of questions – general knowledge, policy, science and two picture rounds. (See the slideshow of the questions and answers below).
After two hours of playing, this year’s winners were announced.
Comprised of players from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India, last time’s second place team, “Emissions Impossible” won the coveted Carbon Brief trophy with a total score of 76 out of 100 available points.
In joint second place, with 59 points, were the “Potato-sized nodules”, a mixed team of journalists from New Scientist, the Times and Business Green.
Sharing second place, after leading at the half-way point, were “You cannot BSEERious” from the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL.
In fourth place, with 57 points, were “Risky Quizness”, from Verisk Maplecroft.
A certificate was awarded to the BBC for the best team name, as voted for by Carbon Brief staff: “High hopes [low confidence]”.
See the full leaderboard:
All the questions and answers from this year’s quiz can be found in this PDF document.
This year’s trickiest round was picture round two, which asked teams to match the quote to the author, with an average score of 5.9 out of 20 available points.
No team correctly guessed that “Chris Funk: Drought, Flood, Fire” was the source of the quote: “How greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere is pretty straightforward. It is really important that we understand this. But almost nobody does, because it is not something that we are taught in school.”
Science was the second hardest round, earning an average score of 6.1 points out of 20.
No team correctly guessed “religious leaders” as the least trustworthy source of climate information, according to a 2025 study using public polling from seven global south countries.
The highest-scoring round was general knowledge, with an average of 13.8 out of 20 questions answered correctly.
Carbon Brief would like to thank all the teams who took part and we look forward to hosting the quiz again in the spring of 2027.
If you would like to participate in next year’s quiz, please contact us in advance at quiz AT carbonbrief DOT org.
Photos by Kerry Cleaver
The post The Carbon Brief Quiz 2026 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
-
Greenhouse Gases7 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change7 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Renewable Energy2 years ago
GAF Energy Completes Construction of Second Manufacturing Facility