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
At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
If you want to fund more impactful reporting like this in 2026, please subscribe and unlock all of our content for just the price of a coffee per week. Or to keep up with our latest coverage, you can sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook.
Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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