The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) held their spring meetings last week in Washington DC – a key event in a critical year for international climate finance.
As the two so-called Bretton Woods institutions mark their 80-year anniversary, they are under growing pressure to reform and deal with the “polycrisis” enveloping the world.
Many developing nations are struggling with growing food insecurity, income inequality and massive debts that are taking up much of their resources.
All of this is making it harder than ever for them to invest in low-carbon energy or prepare their citizens for the growing threat of climate change. At the same time, some wealthy countries have been scaling back their foreign-aid spending.
While the two financial institutions are undergoing reforms, including changes designed to help them tackle climate change, progress so far has been slow.
Developed countries pledged $11bn at the spring meetings to help boost the World Bank’s lending capacity. However, calls for new funds and debt relief for the world’s poorest countries remained largely unanswered.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explains the key outcomes from the spring meetings. The Q&A also looks ahead to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries are due to agree on a new climate finance target.
- Why are the World Bank and IMF spring meetings important for climate action?
- Are countries giving the World Bank more climate finance?
- What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?
- Did the spring meeting provide any debt relief for climate-vulnerable countries?
- Did leaders decide on ‘innovative’ new sources of climate finance?
- What comes next for global financial system reform?
Why are the World Bank and IMF spring meetings important for climate action?
Developing countries need large sums of money to address the climate and development challenges that they face.
An assessment by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) in 2022 concluded that developing and emerging countries – excluding China – need to invest $2.4tn every year, by 2030, to meet their climate goals. This amounts to a fourfold increase from current levels.
(In the report, China is considered alongside the “advanced economies” of Europe, North America and East Asia and the Pacific that see the majority of global climate investment.)
The same group stated that insufficient investment, particularly in emerging and developing economies, was the “primary reason” that the world was “badly off track” on the path to its Paris Agreement targets.
Meanwhile, the world’s poorest countries are facing what the World Bank has described as a “great reversal”, with surging debt distress, food insecurity and income inequality increasing since the Covid-19 pandemic. This “polycrisis” makes it harder for them to address climate change.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) distribute billions of dollars to developing countries every year, largely as loans. These banks are widely viewed as vital for expanding international climate finance and, as the largest MDB, the World Bank is expected to play a key role.
MDBs provided a record $60.9bn of climate finance to developing countries in 2022. However, IHLEG estimates that raising $2.4tn of investment for such nations would require around $250-300bn annually, by 2030, from MDBs and other development finance institutions.
Meanwhile, the IMF – which also lends money, but with a focus on financial stability rather than development – could play a vital role in aiding debt-laden countries that are also facing severe climate hazards.
Over the past year, the World Bank has been undertaking reforms as part of its “evolution roadmap” to increase its spending in developing countries, including more money for climate-related projects.
This came amid a broader push by a group of global-north and global-south nations for reforms to the international financial system – in part to scale up climate finance.
Progress has been slow. One review by the Centre for Global Development concluded that only one-fifth of the required reforms have been implemented by the World Bank so far and, in general, there has been uneven progress across the MDBs.
The spring meetings provided an opportunity for leaders to discuss the status of these activities and push for more progress.
Yet there remains a great deal of mistrust around the role of these institutions in addressing climate change from those who view them as complicit in many of the problems facing developing countries.
“The IMF, as well as the World Bank, contribute greatly to the economic entrapment of the global south,” Dr Fadhel Kaboub, a senior advisor at the thinktank Power Shift Africa, told a press briefing ahead of the spring meetings.
Issues highlighted by campaigners include what they regard as the IMF’s punitive policies for debt-laden countries and the World Bank’s continued financing of fossil-fuel projects.
Finally, the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the end of this year is expected to be the “finance COP”, with nations set to agree on a new climate-finance target to support developing countries.
Writing ahead of the spring meetings, Danny Scull, senior policy advisor for public banks and development at the thinktank E3G, explained that the spring meetings “will set the tone for a key year of transforming the international finance system, which is not limited to these DC-based institutions”.
Are countries giving the World Bank more climate finance?
At the end of this year, wealthy countries are due to “replenish” the International Development Association (IDA) – the arm of the World Bank that provides concessional and grant-based finance to the world’s poorest nations.
Given the challenges ahead, World Bank president Ajay Banga has stated that this replenishment should be the “largest of all time”, calling for $30bn in pledges. Such a commitment would allow IDA to lend more than $100bn.
Much of this money would be climate finance, as the World Bank has pledged to spend 35% of its funds on climate-related projects, rising to 45% by 2025.
Country surveys suggest that IDA funding tends to be well received by developing nations, compared to other sources of funding. However, developed countries such as the US and Germany have reduced their IDA pledges in recent years. Many have cut the foreign aid budgets from which their IDA contributions are drawn.
The last IDA contribution by the UK for example, was less than half its previous one. The government stated in 2022 that it planned to spend more on direct country programmes in order to “control how exactly taxpayers’ money is used to support our priorities”.
Some nations, such as the US, have stressed the need for the World Bank to do more with its existing resources, rather than relying on new investments from donor countries. (See: What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?)
According to the thinktank E3G, an “ambitious” IDA replenishment by wealthy nations would go some way to “re-establish[ing] trust with developing countries” – particularly those in Africa, where more than half of the IDA-eligible states are located.
A report released by the G20 Independent Expert Group last year describes IDA as “the largest source of long-term, cheap financing to low-income countries”, but adds that it is currently “too small to properly address the needs for [climate] adaptation, resilience and mitigation”.
The group therefore recommends a tripling of finance from IDA. This would require a “sharp” increase in contributions from donor countries.
The spring meetings provided a space for discussion of IDA replenishment, which Banga made clear was one of his priorities. A replenishment meeting taking place the week after the event is expected to provide more clarity on how much countries will donate.
What is the World Bank doing to ‘unlock’ more money?
The World Bank is under pressure to change the way it operates and assesses risk in its lending, in order to “unlock” more money from existing funds.
In 2022, an influential report for G20 finance ministers into “capital adequacy frameworks” highlighted measures that it said could unlock “several hundreds of billions of dollars” in extra lending from MDBs.
Crucially, the expert group said this could be done without threatening the financial stability or credit ratings of these banks.
The World Bank has already announced various measures over the past few months to boost lending. However, observers say further steps are needed.
A study by the consultancy Risk Control, which assessed the impact of the G20 report’s proposals, concluded that they could unlock an extra $162bn in lending over a decade from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) – the arm of the World Bank that focuses on middle-income countries.
It also concluded that the reforms could free up an extra $27bn in lending from the IDA.
Speaking to journalists during the spring meetings, Banga said that the World Bank was working through 27 recommendations from the G20 report that apply to the institution.
Franklin Steves, a senior policy adviser in sustainable finance at E3G, tells Carbon Brief that rapid progress was not expected at the meetings:
“There are lots and lots of political, but also legal and technocratic, issues around how the bank and also the other MDBs can implement those measures. They are going to take a lot of time to work through.”
Nevertheless, the spring meetings did see some progress in the World Bank’s reforms programme. Rich countries pledged a total of $11bn towards new instruments that the World Bank has set up as part of its effort to increase lending capacity.
The US, France, Japan and Belgium committed funds to the portfolio guarantee platform. This money will be available to pay off borrowers’ debts if necessary, allowing the World Bank to lend money more freely.
Separately, a group of countries including Germany, Denmark and the UK contributed to the World Bank’s hybrid capital mechanism. This allows shareholders to raise new funds by investing in special bonds from the bank.
According to the World Bank, in total these additional funds will allow it to lend an extra $70bn over the next 10 years.
Generally, the spring meetings also highlighted the World Bank’s interest in working more with the private sector to mobilise finance for renewable energy and other key investments. In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Banga said:
“The reality is that that gap between tens and hundreds of billions to trillions is not a number that the bank can fill…That’s why you do eventually need the private sector.”
The World Bank president’s language mirrors that of other leaders, such as former US climate envoy John Kerry, who has stated repeatedly that “no government in the world” has enough funds to address climate change on its own.
Banga said the bank was working to address regulatory uncertainties in developing countries, foreign currency risk and protecting private investors from war and other unrest.
At the spring meetings, the bank also launched a new partnership with the African Development Bank and private partners to provide 300 million people in Africa with access to electricity by 2030.
This approach has faced criticism from campaigners, who argue that the private sector has so far failed to mobilise significant climate finance for developing countries.
A report from the Bretton Woods Project launched just before the spring meetings concluded that creating “bankable” low-carbon projects in developing countries is “far from straightforward”. It also noted that ensuring such bankability can clash with the interests of citizens in those countries and jeopardise a “just energy transition”.
Did the spring meeting provide any debt relief for climate-vulnerable countries?
Just ahead of the meetings, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva was chosen for another five-year term as the IMF managing director. Her reappointment comes at a fraught time for the institution, as the world faces a mounting global debt crisis.
This issue is rising up the global agenda, with newspaper editorials and prominent figures calling for action to help debt-laden developing countries.
Around 60% of low-income nations are trapped in a cycle of paying off debt, which was exacerbated by borrowing during the Covid-19 pandemic and a surge in interest rates.
Developing countries spent $443.5bn on servicing their debts in 2022. Analysis by the ONE campaign concluded that, as of 2024, more money is flowing out of developed countries to service their debts than is flowing into their governments from external sources.
Many countries, particularly in Africa, are spending more on interest payments than on healthcare, education or climate action. This is particularly problematic for debt-laden nations – such as Malawi – which are dealing with climate-driven disasters and need to spend money on recovery and adaptation.
Analysis by the Debt Relief for Green and Inclusive Recovery (DRGR) project found that among 66 of the world’s most economically vulnerable nations, 47 will likely face insolvency in the next five years if they invest the amounts required to meet their climate and development goals.
Many civil society groups blame the IMF for contributing to these issues. Its approach of encouraging austerity policies so that countries can pay off debts has been responsible for “keep[ing] developing countries in a cycle of crisis”, according to a statement released by ActionAid USA country director Niranjali Amerasinghe.
Moreover, according to E3G, the role of the US Federal Reserve in increasing borrowing costs and the failure of wealthy countries to provide debt relief has been “tremendously corrosive to trust” with developing countries.
Ahead of the spring meetings, civil society groups and academics called for major interventions to address these issues, such as the immediate cancellation of public debt payments for African countries and the “urgent reform” of the G20 “common framework”.
Wealthy creditor nations in the G20 established the common framework in 2020 to help coordinate the restructuring of debts. However, despite the high demand, only four developing countries have used it so far and it has been widely dismissed as inadequate.
Marina Zucker-Marques, a senior academic researcher in global economic governance at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, tells Carbon Brief:
“What is happening today is that countries are defaulting on their development priorities and climate priorities instead of defaulting on their debt.…[They are] doing this because it’s very difficult to get your debt restructured within the common framework.”
One issue is debt sustainability analysis, which is meant to guide the borrowing decisions of low-income countries. As it stands, this calculation of how much money countries can pay towards their debt obligations does not account for their social, development and climate needs.
At the spring meetings, the IMF and the World Bank started discussions of how to reform this analysis to account for climate action and other issues. “This is a welcome path, but it’s something that is going to take two or three years to have a result,” Zucker-Marques explains.
The meetings also saw the launch of an independent review into the links between sovereign debt, nature and climate change, which will consider potential solutions such as debt for nature or climate swaps.
Did leaders decide on ‘innovative’ new sources of climate finance?
Raising the large sums of money required to tackle climate change is expected to involve tapping new sources of finance. Some of these sources were discussed during the spring meetings.
Representatives from a small group of global-north and global-south countries met on the sidelines of the event in the second ever in-person meeting of the international tax task force.
The goal of this initiative is to analyse and design new forms of taxation that could be used to raise money for climate and development needs. Options being considered include taxes on fossil-fuel producers, shipping fuel, air travel and financial transactions.
The group, co-chaired by France, Barbados and Kenya, was joined by Colombia at the event, bringing its total membership up to eight.
Kenyan climate change envoy Ali Mohamed said in a statement that their goal was to “raise much needed financing to tackle climate change while having minimal impact on ordinary people”.
The task force’s ambition is to present one or more options for taxes at COP30 in 2025, with the goal of gathering a coalition of nations that would be willing to implement them. It will present its initial findings at COP29 in Baku.
Meanwhile, there was growing momentum around the idea of a global tax on billionaires, in part to pay for climate action. A “wealth tax” of 2%, which could raise $250bn each year, was initially proposed by G20 chair Brazil in February, but received support from other leaders at the spring meetings, including IMF head Georgieva.
The concept will be developed further and presented at a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in July.
Finally, there was a lot of pressure from NGOs at the spring meetings to shift World Bank finance away from fossil fuels and into low-carbon energy sources. Three US senators also issued a public letter to Banga asking him to commit to ending fossil-fuel financing.
Oil Change International analysis shows that the bank was providing roughly $1.2bn a year to fossil fuel projects in developing countries, between 2020 and 2022. This is in spite of the World Bank committing to “align” all of its lending with the Paris Agreement as of July 2023.
Paola Yanguas Parra, a policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, tells Carbon Brief that current geopolitics are making calls to end fossil-fuel financing harder. “There is a lot of ‘gas as transition fuel’ and ‘gas as development’ being supported [by the World Bank],” she says.
In the end, there was no commitment from the World Bank to change its policies on fossil-fuel financing.
What comes next for global financial system reform?
This year is set to be a critical milestone for international climate finance.
When nations gather in Baku for COP29 in November, they will decide on a “new collective quantified goal” for providing climate finance to developing countries. This will replace the $100bn annual goal, which developed countries may finally have met in 2022, two years after the 2020 deadline.
The COP29 presidency hosted a “dialogue on enabling global action for climate finance” at the spring meetings, which saw president-designate Mukhtar Babayev sketch out broad priorities for the new climate-finance goal.
Other international events will feed into the climate summit and give a sense of progress towards international financial system reforms. In particular, G20 host Brazil will oversee continued discussions around finance at a meeting in July.
The World Bank and IMF annual meetings will then take place in October, shortly before COP29.
The post Q&A: Climate finance at World Bank and IMF spring meetings 2024 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Climate finance at World Bank and IMF spring meetings 2024
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
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 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
The Lincolnshire constituency held by Richard Tice, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of the hard-right Reform party, has been pledged at least £55m in government funding for flood defences since 2024.
This investment in Boston and Skegness is the second-largest sum for a single constituency from a £1.4bn flood-defence fund for England, Carbon Brief analysis shows.
Flooding is becoming more likely and more extreme in the UK due to climate change.
Yet, for years, governments have failed to spend enough on flood defences to protect people, properties and infrastructure.
The £1.4bn fund is part of the current Labour government’s wider pledge to invest a “record” £7.9bn over a decade on protecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses from flooding.
As MP for one of England’s most flood-prone regions, Tice has called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
He is also one of Reform’s most vocal opponents of climate action and what he calls “net stupid zero”. He denies the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed, falsely and without evidence, that scientists are “lying”.
Flood defences
Last year, the government said it would invest £2.65bn on flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) schemes in England between April 2024 and March 2026.
This money was intended to protect 66,500 properties from flooding. It is part of a decade-long Labour government plan to spend more than £7.9bn on flood defences.
There has been a consistent shortfall in maintaining England’s flood defences, with the Environment Agency expecting to protect fewer properties by 2027 than it had initially planned.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has attributed this to rising costs, backlogs from previous governments and a lack of capacity. It also points to the strain from “more frequent and severe” weather events, such as storms in recent years that have been amplified by climate change.
However, the CCC also said last year that, if the 2024-26 spending programme is delivered, it would be “slightly closer to the track” of the Environment Agency targets out to 2027.
The government has released constituency-level data on which schemes in England it plans to fund, covering £1.4bn of the 2024-26 investment. The other half of the FCERM spending covers additional measures, from repairing existing defences to advising local authorities.
The map below shows the distribution of spending on FCERM schemes in England over the past two years, highlighting the constituency of Richard Tice.
By far the largest sum of money – £85.6m in total – has been committed to a tidal barrier and various other defences in the Somerset constituency of Bridgwater, the seat of Conservative MP Ashley Fox.
Over the first months of 2026, the south-west region has faced significant flooding and Fox has called for more support from the government, citing “climate patterns shifting and rainfall intensifying”.
He has also backed his party’s position that “the 2050 net-zero target is impossible” and called for more fossil-fuel extraction in the North Sea.
Tice’s east-coast constituency of Boston and Skegness, which is highly vulnerable to flooding from both rivers and the sea, is set to receive £55m. Among the supported projects are beach defences from Saltfleet to Gibraltar Point and upgrades to pumping stations.
Overall, Boston and Skegness has the second-largest portion of flood-defence funding, as the chart below shows. Constituencies with Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs occupied the other top positions.
Overall, despite Labour MPs occupying 347 out of England’s 543 constituencies – nearly two-thirds of the total – more than half of the flood-defence funding was distributed to constituencies with non-Labour MPs. This reflects the flood risk in coastal and rural areas that are not traditional Labour strongholds.
Reform funding
While Reform has just eight MPs, representing 1% of the population, its constituencies have been assigned 4% of the flood-defence funding for England.
Nearly all of this money was for Tice’s constituency, although party leader Nigel Farage’s coastal Clacton seat in Kent received £2m.
Reform UK is committed to “scrapping net-zero” and its leadership has expressed firmly climate-sceptic views.
Much has been made of the disconnect between the party’s climate policies and the threat climate change poses to its voters. Various analyses have shown the flood risk in Reform-dominated areas, particularly Lincolnshire.
Tice has rejected climate science, advocated for fossil-fuel production and criticised Environment Agency flood-defence activities. Yet, he has also called for more investment in flood defences, stating that “we cannot afford to ‘surrender the fens’ to the sea”.
This may reflect Tice’s broader approach to climate change. In a 2024 interview with LBC, he said:
“Where you’ve got concerns about sea level defences and sea level rise, guess what? A bit of steel, a bit of cement, some aggregate…and you build some concrete sea level defences. That’s how you deal with rising sea levels.”
While climate adaptation is viewed as vital in a warming world, there are limits on how much societies can adapt and adaptation costs will continue to increase as emissions rise.
The post Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Constituency of Reform’s climate-sceptic Richard Tice gets £55m flood funding
Greenhouse Gases
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Food inflation on the rise
DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.
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NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.
‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.
El Niño looms
NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”
WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”
CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.
News and views
- DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
- SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
- NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
- COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
- FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
- TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.
Spotlight
Nature talks inch forward
This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.
The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.
The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.
The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.
Money talks
Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.
Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.
Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.
Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:
“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”
Monitoring and reporting
Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.
Parties do so through the submission of national reports.
Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.
A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.
Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:
“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”
Watch, read, listen
NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.
COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.
HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.
‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.
New science
- Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
- Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food
In the diary
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean | Brasília
- 5 March: Nepal general elections
- 9-20 March: First part of the thirty-first session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.
Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
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