The UK is roughly halving the climate aid it allocates to developing countries, when accounting changes and inflation are factored in, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief.
On 19 March, the government announced that the UK would provide “around £6bn” of international “climate finance” over the next three years.
This replaces a previous goal to provide £11.6bn across the 2021-2026 period to help nations in the global south cut their emissions and deal with climate threats.
The new target was reported as a spending reduction of up to 14% compared to recent years, reflecting the UK’s wider plan to cut development aid and spend more on defence.
In fact, Carbon Brief analysis reveals that the cut is far larger in real terms, with the new target worth around 30% less per year once inflation is taken into account.
When also excluding the government’s use of widely criticised “creative accounting” to boost apparent spending, the new pledge is roughly 50% lower than the old one.
The drop in climate finance means that – alongside other major donors – the UK is diverging from an international target, agreed in 2024 at COP29 in Baku, to ramp up climate aid to $300bn a year by 2035.
‘Innovative reforms’
Under the Paris Agreement, the UK and other developed countries committed to provide financial support for climate action in developing countries. This “climate finance” comes from the UK’s wider budget for “official development assistance”.
Successive governments have pledged set amounts of climate finance over five-year periods, supporting everything from solar energy in Nigeria to mangroves in Indonesia.
In 2019, the Conservative government promised to “double” the previous target of £5.8bn for the financial years 2016-17 to 2020-21 and reach a total of £11.6bn between 2021-22 and 2025-26.
The current Labour government inherited this goal in 2024, at a time of geopolitical instability, conflict and threats to global climate action.
Alongside other developed countries, the UK then pledged at the COP29 climate summit in2024 to roughly triple the total amount of global climate finance to $300bn a year by 2035.
With its £11.6bn target expiring in April 2026, the government has been under pressure to set a new goal that would increase climate finance in line with this global ambition.
Instead, since COP29, the UK has announced it will cut overall aid spending to 0.3% of gross national income, compared to the historic 0.7%, to raise money for military spending.
This continues a trend of aid cuts started by the former Conservative government and mirrors similar cuts taking place in other countries. Most notably, the US has virtually eliminated its contribution to international climate finance.
In March, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper finally announced details of how the UK’s headline cuts in overseas aid would impact specific spending priorities between 2026-27 and 2028-29, including climate finance. She said:
“Over the next three years, the UK will spend around £6bn of official development assistance as international climate finance. We will balance support between mitigation and adaptation and maintain a focus on nature.”
This amounts to a clear cut in annual climate-finance spending, even without considering the impact of inflation or accounting changes, as the chart below shows.
Despite Cooper’s pledge to “maintain a focus on nature”, the government also scrapped the “ring-fencing” of funds for nature and forest conservation, as well as the practice of setting five-year goals to provide more certainty to climate-aid recipients.
(The relatively vague “around” £6bn is also notable, given the previous targets were set at precisely £11.6bn and £5.8bn. This could allow the government to ultimately spend less than £6bn.)
The government is also clear that it is shifting its focus to using public development aid to “unlock private investment for development”, framing its overall approach as “innovative development reforms”. Cooper stated that, as well as the £6bn in climate finance:
“We will aim to generate an additional £6.7bn of UK-backed climate and nature positive investments and to mobilise billions more in private finance.”
Cooper described “climate and nature” as two of the government’s four “priority” themes for its dwindling aid spending.
Nevertheless, the international development committee of MPs expressed “deep concern” about the new climate pledge and NGOs called it a “backward step”.
Accounting changes
Media coverage of Cooper’s announcement stated that the new climate-finance target was 13-14% lower than the previous one.
This is based on the difference between average annual contributions out to 2029 under the new pledge – around £2bn – and the £2.3bn average from the previous period.
However, Carbon Brief analysis suggests that this straightforward approach makes the target seem more ambitious than it actually is.
When the £11.6bn target was set in 2019, only specific, climate-related projects funded directly by the UK government counted towards it. Then, in 2023, the Conservative government decided to loosen the criteria for the funds it counted towards the target.
This included relabelling existing support for multilateral development banks (MDBs), humanitarian aid and more private-sector investments as “climate finance”.
This approach – which mirrors that of other climate-finance donors – means the government is now on track to hit the £11.6bn target. (For more details, see Carbon Brief’s previous coverage.)
NGOs criticised this “creative accounting” at the time. Similarly, the UK’s official aid watchdog described the changes as “moving the goalposts”, as they meant the government could meet its target without providing as much new money. Nevertheless, the current Labour government has retained the changes.
The government released a list of specific aid allocations alongside Cooper’s recent announcement, which includes how much it plans to give to MDBs, as well as the UK-owned development body, British International Investment (BII).
Most of this money would not have been counted as climate finance under the old accounting system. Under the new system, a large portion of it will be.
Carbon Brief estimates that £1.7bn of new climate finance over the next three years – roughly 28% of the total – would not have counted as climate finance before the government’s accounting changes.
As the chart above shows, much of the money reclassified as climate aid will derive from automatically counting a fixed share of UK funding for MDBs as “climate-relevant”.
MDBs, including the World Bank and the African Development Bank, are major contributors to global climate finance. Member states, such as the UK, pay money into these banks, which then use their financial resources to support development projects.
Notably, while virtually all of the UK’s traditional climate finance has been provided as grants to developing countries, MDBs provide most of their support as loans. The prevalence of loans in global climate finance is a long-standing point of contention for developing countries.
Including inflation
The second key factor that influences the comparison between the UK’s old and new climate-finance targets is inflation. Experts have highlighted the importance of correcting for inflation when considering long-term finance targets.
This issue is particularly important now, as in recent years there has been significant inflation in the UK and around the world. This means the finance that the UK committed to give back in 2019 would not go as far today as it did then.
Adjusting for this inflation, Carbon Brief estimates that the £11.6bn target would equate to £14.3bn today, using 2021-22 – the start of the £11.6bn target – as the base year.
This means the government would have to pledge £14.3bn over five years – or £2.86bn a year – just to match the spending power of its previous goal. This new goal of £2bn a year is effectively a 30% real-terms cut in annual climate finance from the UK.
As the chart below shows, the previous climate target from five years ago is roughly twice as large per year as the new 2026 target, after correcting for inflation and once accounting changes have been removed.
Of course, ultimately, the government relied on accounting changes to meet the previous £11.6bn target as well.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows the significant backsliding in ambition, from 2021 when the plan was an £11.6bn goal, relying on a narrow range of sources – to a 2026 target that is lower in real terms, while drawing from a wider range of sources.
Global cuts
In 2024, developed countries such as the UK collectively agreed to raise their global climate-finance contributions to $300bn a year by 2035, as part of their Paris Agreement obligations.
This international target replaced the previous goal of $100bn per year by 2020, which was belatedly met in 2022.
While the new target will include large contributions from the private sector and MDBs, there is an expectation that a significant portion of it will still come directly from developed countries.
In this context, it is clear that the trajectory of UK climate finance is going in the wrong direction – falling, rather than increasing
The UK is certainly not alone in this regard. Speaking in parliament, Cooper told MPs that “allies such as Germany, France and Sweden have made similar choices” to cut aid in order to fund military spending.
Very few developed countries – and none of the biggest donors – have officially announced new or updated climate-finance targets for the coming years.
However, analysis by aid organisation CARE International last year concluded that other major climate-finance donors, including Germany and France, will also see their climate finance fall over the coming year, following cuts to their aid budgets.
The most significant drop has come from the US, which has effectively cut its international climate finance from several billion dollars a year to zero, under the Trump administration.
In addition to cutting its overall contribution, the UK is signalling that it will focus less on grant-based climate finance from government spending and more on “unlocking” billions of pounds in private-sector finance for climate action, as well as on “reform of the international development system”.
Such approaches may end up playing a major role in nations hitting the $300bn target by 2035.
However, this is highly contentious, with many developing countries arguing at UN negotiations that developed countries are reneging on their responsibilities to directly “provide” climate finance.
Methodology
The UK has announced that it will spend “around £6bn” on international climate finance between 2026-27 and 2028-29. Alongside this announcement, it released a list of “official development assistance (ODA) programme allocations 2026-27-2028-29”. These include details of “planned multilateral ODA programming” – covering MDBs – and spending on “arm’s-length bodies, private sector investments, subscriptions”, including BII.
Carbon Brief calculated the climate-related shares of core MDB finance – which the UK now counts as climate finance – using the climate shares for each MDB identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2023. These estimates may be conservative, as MDBs have committed to increasing the shares of their projects that are climate-related.
Carbon Brief calculated the extra BII contributions that the UK will count as climate finance by assuming, based on the most recent BII annual accounts, that 41% of its commitments each year will be climate-related. Previously, only 30% of BII contributions were counted as climate finance, so Carbon Brief assumed the difference between these shares would be additional.
The government has also said it now automatically counts 30% of all humanitarian assistance provided to the 10% most climate-vulnerable countries as climate finance. Based on figures provided to Carbon Brief via freedom of information request, this amounts to roughly 10% of all humanitarian assistance in recent years. The government has said it will “spend approximately £1.4bn each year in the places with the highest humanitarian need over the next three years”. Carbon Brief assumed that 10% of this – £140m each year – would count as climate finance.
To calculate the impact of inflation on the £11.6bn target, Carbon Brief used the UK Treasury’s GDP deflator, with 2021-22 as the baseline year.
The figures in this analysis are estimates based on the data released by the government so far. Climate-finance data is subject to various accounting changes and the final figures – when they are released – are likely to be different.
The post Analysis: UK is ‘halving’ its climate finance for developing countries appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK is ‘halving’ its climate finance for developing countries
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.