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
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according