A new programme to boost the climate resilience of drought-hit farmers in Iraq. Electricity installations that would give millions across Southern Africa access to clean energy. The conservation of critical ecosystems in Honduras to help local communities improve their livelihoods at home instead of needing to migrate to countries like the United States.
These and hundreds more climate programmes funded by the US government risk disappearing as an administration led by President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk threatens to shutter the state aid agency, USAID, and slash overseas development assistance.
“I think this is the end of US [government] climate funding,” predicted Karen Mathiasen, a project director with the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think-tank. In an interview with Climate Home, she described as “shocking” the speed and brazenness with which the government is attempting to dismantle its foreign aid arm.
Which countries have not ratified the Paris climate agreement?
Aid organisations and contractors have been grappling with an unprecedented crisis since, on his first day in office, Trump ordered a 90-day funding freeze during which a programme-by-programme review would be carried out.
As the world’s largest bilateral development assistance agency, USAID is a major provider of grant-based finance for climate action in the Global South. Its climate programmes – amounting to close to half a billion dollars in 2024 – help countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and protect their citizens from the escalating effects of global warming.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio – who is now in charge of USAID’s work – said last week that only projects that make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous” will survive the cull, without explaining which criteria would be used for the assessment.
‘Devastating’ consequences
The sudden move has thrown the development world into disarray, with organisations forced to halt their operations overnight and furlough or lay off staff without being able to obtain clear information or guidance from US officials.
A USAID project in Honduras strengthens the sustainability of coffee farming. Credit: USAID/Honduras Transforming Market
Speaking to Climate Home, aid workers involved in USAID-funded climate projects in the Global South painted a picture of bewilderment and confusion.
“We are no longer able to transfer funds to our local partners – and it will be really hard for them to manage costs,” explained one senior official at a global humanitarian group, underscoring the “devastating” consequences of the funding freeze for frontline organisations.
Working in conflict-afflicted regions, the aid group supports projects to build climate resilience that struggle to attract any financing outside of development money, said the official, adding “that has all gone away now”.
“For many programmes a 90-day pause is as good as a cancellation because you lose all momentum, you lose community connection, you lose the trust you built up with communities which is vital to success,” they added.
Separately, in Malawi, Climate Home has learned that all USAID-funded projects have been halted, with staff members being told to remain at home, just as the country was hit by deadly floods last week.
Climate aid powerhouse
Climate Home analysed USAID’s portfolio of climate projects before its website went offline late last week, soon after Trump-ally Musk, the world’s richest man, labelled the agency as “a criminal organisation”, without providing evidence – and called for its closure.
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead. https://t.co/0V35nacICW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025
One of USAID’s single largest climate projects supports the large-scale roll-out of clean energy facilities across Southern Africa. With total budgeted funding of $84.5 million up to 2028, the programme aims to set up 3 million new electricity connections and avoid 14 million tonnes of planet-heating emissions – equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Ivory Coast.
Other large US-backed renewable energy projects target Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Ecuador, Colombia and Bangladesh. The vast majority of these are implemented by profit-making American corporations that would be financially hit by any funding cuts.
Climate adaptation also features prominently in USAID’s portfolio. In the last year alone, the agency committed $22 million to boost the ability of farming communities in Iraq to deal with climate-related drought and $18.5 million to help the adoption of climate resilience measures in Palestine. Similar initiatives have been in place in dozens more countries across the Pacific, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Many other USAID projects include climate-related activities – even if they are not explicitly labelled as such – especially in very fragile and conflict-affected regions.
“No future”
It is impossible to predict what will happen to USAID and its thousands of programmes in what is a fast-changing situation – although many staff are due to be placed on administrative leave at the end of this week amid rumours it will be be folded into the State Department. Any fundamental reforms of the agency, and especially its touted abolition, would legally need to be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress.
But, as far as climate action is concerned, some experts believe the writing is already on the wall.
Shell dodges paying compensation for sham carbon credits in China
Along with the wider funding freeze, on his January 20 inauguration day Trump explicitly ordered federal agencies to explain how they would “revoke or rescind” policies implemented to support his predecessor Joe Biden’s international climate finance plan.
“I see no future [for climate projects],” the humanitarian official said, speaking anonymously due to the sensitivity of the situation, adding that it remains to be seen whether some resilience-building activities could be woven into humanitarian assistance, which is more likely to be continued. “But anything that talks significantly, or even marginally, about climate change doesn’t have a future.”
CGD’s Mathiasen, who offered a similar view, said adaptation finance stands to suffer the most severe consequences from the aid pullback. “It will further create further challenges to an agenda that’s already horrendously underfunded, while needs are real and growing,” she added.
The outlook might be less gloomy for renewable energy projects which offer higher returns and could more easily tap other financing sources. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, development banks have committed more than $50 billion to an ambitious “Mission 300” initiative aiming to provide 300 million energy-poor people with electricity by 2030.
African governments opt for gas-run cars over EVs to drive down transport emissions
“It is hard to tell yet [what will happen],” said Saliem Fakir, executive director of the Africa Climate Foundation, “but generally large power projects rely on multiple funders – and we also have significant flows of funds from the Gulf States.”
Other major global powers, like China, might be looking to fill the gap as developing nations conclude they can no longer rely on US funding. “The US reputation will suffer as the US will be seen as an unreliable partner and a non-rational actor,” said Mathiasen. “For that reason, this is extraordinarily short-sighted”.
Climate finance goals harder to reach?
Faten Aggad, executive director of the African Future Policies Hub, told Climate Home that an “unprecedented” shift in international aid flows should prompt recipient countries to reevaluate their policies.
“It is a reminder that ODA [overseas development assistance] is not an economic development strategy,” she said. “Countries will need to work on structural solutions to fund their needs, and that includes looking beyond direct financial transfers from development partners.”
But, in the near-term, it will be difficult to quickly find alternative sources of finance for projects dependent on US grants, Aggad warned.
A US retreat from aid funding could also significantly affect the ability of developed countries to fulfill their promise of channelling at least $300 billion a year in climate finance to developing nations by 2035 – an agreement struck just over two months ago at COP29.
In 2022, US contributions accounted for 12% of developed countries’ climate finance through bilateral channels and multilateral climate funds under the previous $100-billion annual goal, according to analysis by US-based think-tank the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In comments made last week, Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, said “it is still too early to tell what US cuts will mean for reaching the $300-billion and $1.3-trillion [climate finance] goals by 2035 – but they may impact the pace of the scale-up.”
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; additional reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post “No future”: Climate projects face existential threat after Trump’s aid shutdown appeared first on Climate Home News.
“No future”: Climate projects face existential threat after Trump’s aid shutdown
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
The post Türkiye pushes “zero waste” at COP31, but is it delivering at home? appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/
More than 92,000 people have registered to attend the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, potentially making it the largest COP in history.
Carbon Brief analysis of the provisional lists of delegates, published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reveals that more than 14,000 delegates have been registered as “host country guests”.
For comparison, the provisional list for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year included only around 1,000 delegates in this category.
As with COP30, Donald Trump’s US government has not sent a delegation. Other no-shows include Israel and Myanmar.
It was reported ahead of the summit that Taliban officials from Afghanistan had been registered for the event as observers; however, there are no delegates from observer states in the provisional lists.
With more than 3,000 “virtual” delegates signed up to attend the summit online, the total number of people registered for the event surpasses 95,000.
Further analysis of the participant lists will be added to this article in due course.
Party delegates
With 92,934 participants registered, COP31 is provisionally the largest COP in history – topping COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This total is based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has ended.
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP31 compare to the final totals in previous COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP31 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation-states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 18,812 delegates – the second largest after COP28.
Membership
Support award-winning climate journalism
(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers takes the total for party representatives to more than 34,000.
Nations
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP31. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
Unsurprisingly, host nation Turkey has registered the largest delegation for COP31 – with 2,950 people.
Following behind are Brazil (1,994 people), Nigeria (1,506), China (1,021) and Indonesia (978).
The rest of the top 10 is made up of Australia (835), Uganda (627), Italy (607), Japan (588) and Kazakhstan (557).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 255.