The UK government has reclassified nearly £500m of aid for war-torn and impoverished countries as “climate finance”, in a bid to meet its international commitments under the Paris Agreement.
This follows reports that the UK’s pledge to spend £11.6bn on climate aid between 2021-22 and 2025-26 is slipping out of reach, due to government cuts.
A freedom-of-information (FOI) request by Carbon Brief reveals how, after the reclassification, money for humanitarian work in nations including Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia is now being double-counted as climate finance to help the UK hit its goal.
The projects being double-counted include work to provide food and basic necessities that have no explicit link to climate action, Carbon Brief’s analysis reveals. Some of their internal reports even state clearly that they are not climate-finance projects.
This is part of a wider revision of climate-finance accounting, introduced by the government in 2023 to ensure the UK achieves its £11.6bn target.
By redefining existing funds pegged for development banks, investment in foreign businesses and humanitarian aid as “climate finance”, the government expects to add £1.72bn to its total.
Experts tell Carbon Brief it is “problematic” and “unjust” to relabel existing funds as climate finance rather than providing new money. One says the UK could meet its target, at least in part, by “double counting development and climate finance”.
The chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group at UN climate talks says the UK’s actions are a “clear deviation from the path to climate justice”.
‘Moving the goalposts’
The UK government has committed to spending £11.6bn on international climate finance (ICF) between 2021-22 and 2025-26. This is the nation’s contribution to climate action in developing countries, which it is obliged to provide under the Paris Agreement.
Developed countries, such as the UK, have committed to sending “new and additional” climate finance to developing countries. This is generally interpreted as spending extra money on top of existing foreign aid.
The UK government itself has described the £11.6bn goal as “dedicated ring-fenced funding that is distinguishable from non-climate [aid]”.
However, reports began to emerge in 2023 that the government was not on track to meet its target.
Experts attributed this to the government cutting its overall foreign aid budget. In November 2020, the government suspended a target to give 0.7% of national income as overseas aid – reducing it to 0.5% as a “temporary measure”.
The government is also spending more of the remaining funds on supporting refugees within the UK. The latest figures show that in 2023, the UK spent more of its aid budget on supporting asylum seekers and refugees in the country than on overseas projects.
In order to remain on track for the £11.6bn goal, development minister Andrew Mitchell announced in October 2023 that the government was changing the way it calculated ICF spending.
This immediately sparked concerns that the government was inflating its climate-finance figures without providing any new aid money for developing countries. Mitchell provided limited details of how the government was getting its target back on track.
More information came in a report released in February by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI). It concluded that, by “moving the goalposts”, the government had reclassified £1.72bn of spending as climate finance between 2021-22 and 2025-26.
This figure includes four tranches of funding that had not previously been considered ICF:
- £746m from assuming that a share of the “core” funding the UK gives to the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) will be assigned to climate-related projects.
- £497m from automatically labelling 30% of the humanitarian aid spent in the 10% of countries that are most vulnerable to climate change as ICF.
- An estimated £266m from defining more payments into British International Investment (BII), the UK’s overseas development finance institution, as ICF.
- £215m from civil servants “scrubbing” the aid portfolio – namely, going back over existing projects and adding any climate-relevant funding they had previously missed.
The figures cited by ICAI are based on unpublished government analysis, which Carbon Brief has now obtained via FOI.
The analysis includes the annual contributions each of these sources are expected to provide over the period from 2021-22 to 2025-26, which can be seen in the coloured sections of the chart below.
As the chart indicates, even with the methodology changes, the £11.6bn target is still “backloaded”, with a significant uptick in ICF spending required beyond 2023-24 to meet it.
ICAI notes that, since the government cut its aid spending from the UN-backed benchmark of 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI), “serious concerns remain over whether the heavily backloaded spending plan can be delivered”.
Core funding
The largest tranche of redefined ICF – some £740m – comes from the government starting to assume that a share of its “core” MDB funding counts as climate finance.
This is money that the UK government already hands to these organisations to distribute according to their own priorities, primarily through loans. None of this money has previously been counted by the UK government as ICF, even though some went towards climate action.
MDBs, including the World Bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and others have placed a growing emphasis on climate change in recent years. The World Bank, for example, has a target of spending 35% of its finance on climate-related projects.
Following the reclassification, the UK government will simply assume that 35% of the money it gives to the World Bank – some £495m of £1.4bn total due in 2025/26 – counts as ICF.
It will use a similar approach for its funding of other MDBs, with these changes adding a total of £740m to the amount of the UK’s aid spending that is classified as ICF.
This move will not result in the UK providing any new funds for climate action, as it was already planning on distributing this money. In fact, the government has cut its spending on MDBs in recent years, due to the overall cut in the UK’s foreign aid budget.
Humanitarian aid
The second-largest tranche of newly reclassified climate finance is from projects in climate-vulnerable countries, an additional £497m of which is being counted as ICF.
The government dataset obtained by Carbon Brief via FOI reveals the 28 humanitarian projects and five more general, country-specific funds that will contribute to this additional £497m.
The projects are based in some of the poorest and most war-torn countries in the world – Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
They largely focus on essential provisions, such as food and basic infrastructure.
Prior to the recent changes, these programmes would have contributed just £47.5m to ICF, according to the government data released to Carbon Brief.
By automatically counting 30% of their spend as ICF, this figure has now multiplied more than 10 times. The chart below shows, in red, these additional ICF funds.
For the 23 of the 28 projects with documentation available online, Carbon Brief assessed the relevant sections of their “business case and summary” documents for evidence that they were related to climate action.
Many of the project documents reference climate change and say they will provide climate benefits. For example, all four projects in Somalia, a nation that has faced devastating drought and floods in recent years, mention the importance of climate resilience in their work.
However, some of the projects explicitly state that they are not intended to provide climate-finance.
The summary document for the Assurance and Learning Programme (ALP) in Afghanistan, published in 2021, states: “The programme will not be eligible for ICF nor will it monitor ICF funded programmes.”
Similarly, the Congo Humanitarian, Resilience and Protection (CHRESP) Programme summary document, also published in 2021, notes “we do not anticipate that any of our programming under this programme will be eligible as ICF”.
Another project, titled Yemen: Access, Logistics, Liaison, and Accountability, will provide “few opportunities” to address climate change, according to the summary document. A further four project documents do not contain any reference to climate change.
Despite this, following the government’s reclassification, these seven projects will collectively contribute £166.9m of UK climate finance in the coming years.
Euan Ritchie, a senior development finance policy advisor at the thinktank Development Initiatives, says blanket approaches to assigning climate finance are “problematic”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Just because humanitarian aid is going to a country that is vulnerable to climate change doesn’t mean it addresses that vulnerability. And these projects have already been screened for their climate focus.”
He points to one of the projects, the Somalia Humanitarian and Resilience Programme, as an example. Ritchie says, based on International Aid Transparency Initiative data, that officials had already decided around 12% of this programme’s spending was ICF, and asks:
“So what rationale is there for bumping it up to 30%? Were officials wrong the first time?”
Fatuma Hussein, a programme manager at the thinktank Power Shift Africa, tells Carbon Brief such an approach is “unfair and unjust” as it “risks conflating” the “distinct needs” of climate aid and other humanitarian objectives.
In its guidance for categorising what counts as climate finance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee recommends scoring many humanitarian projects “zero”, indicating programmes that “generally do not qualify” as climate aid.
More private investment
The third-largest tranche of reclassified development aid relates to state-backed private sector investment under British International Investment (BII).
The UK government will also now count more of its payments into BII as climate finance, amounting to around an extra £266m by 2025-26. Unlike aid spending, these are investments in the private sector and are expected to yield a financial return for the UK.
Previously, the government counted a fixed 30% of BII spending as climate finance. It now intends to include a higher percentage to reflect a growing focus on climate investments.
The new approach to BII investments assesses the share of each project that should count towards UK climate finance case-by-case, rather than using a blanket 30% share.
It will record 100% of investments in a programme covering the Philippines, Indonesia and other parts of south-east Asia as ICF, as part of the government’s “Indo-Pacific tilt”. Investments in other regions also contribute a higher share of ICF – rising as high as 46% in 2022-23.
The chart below shows the extra BII investment money (red) that now counts as ICF.
The figure above shows that the government expects private sector investment via BII to play an increasingly large role in its climate finance in the future.
Many observers have expressed concerns about the government leaning more on private investment through BII to boost its ICF spending.
A report last year by the parliamentary international development committee criticised BII’s investment in, among other things, fossil fuels and “high-net-worth individuals”.
BII prioritises loans and projects in middle-income nations where there is money to be made, rather than the nations that are most in need of climate finance.
ICAI highlighted this in its review of the UK’s climate finance commitments earlier this year, stating that private investment “is not always the most appropriate, realistic or preferred form of climate finance in the poorest and most fragile contexts”.
Not new, not additional
Developing countries will require trillions of dollars of investment in the coming years to meet their climate goals.
To help achieve this, developed countries, such as the UK, are expected to provide finance under the UN climate system that is “new and additional”. Discussions around a new climate finance goal will take centre stage this year at the COP29 climate summit in Baku.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that the UK government’s changes to its ICF undermine the notion that it is providing new, “ring-fenced” funding. Regarding the “arbitrary” labelling of humanitarian funds as ICF, Ritchie says:
“If the UK is counting a fixed share of projects as ICF it can no longer claim that ICF is distinguishable from non-climate [aid].”
Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at the international development network Bond, tells Carbon Brief:
“The change of definition means they will be able to reach the target by spending less money than they would have done otherwise through double counting development and climate finance.”
Development NGOs say the best way for the UK to scale up its climate finance would be to return its foreign aid budget to 0.7% of GNI. However, with an election looming, neither the ruling Conservatives nor their Labour challengers have indicated a willingness to do this.
There will be considerable pressure on developed countries in the coming months to commit to providing plentiful, high-quality climate finance in the run up to COP29.
Evans Njewa, the chair of the LDC group, to which nearly all of the UK’s humanitarian aid ICF recipients belong, tells Carbon Brief:
“Reclassifying existing donor aid as climate finance is a clear deviation from the path to climate justice, and closing the finance gap cannot be achieved this way.”
Climate-finance reporting has been described as a “wild west”, with countries announcing figures based on vastly different definitions. This has led to nations counting money for coal, hotels and films in their totals, as there is no binding international standard to guide them.
The UK government noted last year that its changes are in line with other countries’ methods. But experts point out that the UK was previously viewed as setting a high standard for other countries to reach.
In contrast, the new approach “risks breeding cynicism and mistrust because you are going to find programmes that have very little to do with climate change, but end up being reported in the pot as climate finance”, Rabinowitz says.
Hussein agrees, telling Carbon Brief:
“This not only highlights the disparity between western countries’ rhetoric on climate finance and their actual financial commitments to developing countries but also risks undermining trust that underpins global climate action.”
She argues that nations should agree on common definitions and accounting methodologies for climate finance to ensure that governments cannot backslide as the UK has.
Responding to Carbon Brief’s questions about the government’s methodology changes, a spokesperson from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said:
“Since 2011, UK funding has helped more than 100 million people cope with the effects of climate change, given 70 million people access to clean energy and reduced or avoided over 86m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The UK remains on track to meet the £11.6bn international climate finance commitment.”
The post Revealed: UK ‘double counting’ £500m of aid for war-torn countries as climate finance appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: UK ‘double counting’ £500m of aid for war-torn countries as climate finance
Antarctic sea ice has recorded its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 48 years ago, new data reveals.
Provisional data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that Antarctic sea ice hit its annual winter peak on 14 September, with an extent of 17.59m square kilometres (km2).
The organisation notes that the data is still preliminary, adding that “large fluctuations in extent are typical of Antarctic sea ice near the seasonal maximum”.
One expert tells Carbon Brief that it is “concerning to see these low values persisting”, but says that scientists need more time to determine whether this represents a “structural shift” in Antarctic sea ice extent.
Meanwhile, at the Earth’s other pole, Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on 12 September, ranking as the joint-10th lowest in the satellite record.
The NSIDC notes that the last 20 years have seen the lowest 20 Arctic sea ice extents in the satellite record.
Antarctic peak
Dr Lettie Roach, a polar climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, tells Carbon Brief that this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum was “well below average for the season”. She warns that, “after several decades of stable or increasing winter Antarctic sea ice conditions, it is concerning to see these low values persisting”.
She adds:
“Compared with the Arctic, it’s less clear how recent changes in Antarctic sea ice are attributable to human-caused warming vs natural variability. We need more years of observations to better understand whether this is truly a structural shift.”
Dr Clare Eayrs, a postdoctoral researcher at the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI), tells Carbon Brief that, since recording a “near-average February minimum” extent, Antarctic sea ice has “returned to unusually low winter coverage”.
She notes that Antarctic sea ice extent in July and August this year were the fifth and fourth lowest on record, respectively, adding that “all five of the lowest July extents have occurred since 2022 and all four of the lowest August extents since 2023”.
The chart below shows Antarctic sea ice extent in 2025 (dark blue) and 2026 (red) so far. For comparison, the chart shows decadal averages (dotted lines) as well as 2023 (mid blue), the year of the smallest winter sea-ice maximum on record.
Eayrs tells Carbon Brief that the regional pattern of Antarctic sea ice cover “changed substantially during the growth season”.
For example, she says that “in April, the Bellingshausen Sea remained almost entirely ice-free, while the neighbouring Amundsen Sea had more ice than usual”.
However, by late August, changes in atmospheric pressure and wind meant that “the Bellingshausen deficit had largely recovered, while ice was unusually scarce in the Amundsen Sea and across much of East Antarctica”.
Arctic minimum
Meanwhile, the Arctic recorded its minimum summer sea ice extent on 12 September. At 4.60m km2, this year ties with 2025, 2010 and 2008 as the 10th-lowest sea ice extent on record.
The chart below shows Arctic sea ice extent in 2025 (dark blue) and 2026 (red) so far. For comparison, the chart shows decadal averages (dotted lines) as well as 2012 (mid blue), the year of the smallest summer sea-ice minimum on record.
Roach tells Carbon Brief that although this minimum is not “record setting”, it is still “lower than any sea ice minimum before 2007”. She adds:
“Human-caused climate change has reduced Arctic sea ice cover and thickness, so the region is fundamentally different compared to a few decades ago.”
Scientists have been tracking Arctic sea ice thickness using a reanalysis produced called the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) since 1979.
In March 2026, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) terminated a global dataset of air pressure that scientists relied upon to produce PIOMAS, forcing both datasets to stop publishing updates.
The PIOMAS website says it will take “considerable effort and time” to find alternative data to use in their reanalysis. It adds that “we don’t yet have a good sense if that’s possible with available funds and if so, when we will be able to resume production of a new PIOMAS timeseries”.
Roach also notes that August saw record-breaking heat sweep across much of the world, explaining that high temperatures “extended into Arctic coastal regions, close to regions with substantial sea ice loss – particularly the Barents-Kara and East Siberian seas”.
Dr Zack Labe, a scientist at Climate Central, tells Carbon Brief that the absence of a new record does not mean that ice cover is becoming more “resilient”. He says:
“Local weather patterns across the Arctic play a really important role in year-to-year sea-ice extent, even as the long-term trend is clearly downward.”
Labe tells Carbon Brief that weather in the Arctic this summer was “influenced mainly by lower pressure toward the central Arctic, which brought cloudier and cooler conditions that limited surface melt and delayed the start of the melt season”.
He explains that this “was most obvious across parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, where the melt season didn’t really kick off until after early July, which was more than two weeks later than normal”.
In contrast, he says, the Atlantic side of the Arctic “had a much more extreme summer”, with sea ice in the Barents Sea recording its “earliest melt-out on record”.
This was partly due to “unusually warm air and ocean temperatures”, Labe says. He notes, for example, that parts of western Siberia saw unusually persistent temperatures more than 5C above the 1981-2010 average for much of the summer, which extended out over the Kara Sea and contributed to substantial ice melt in this area”.
Labe tells Carbon Brief that, going forward, scientists need “more data and observations of other sea-ice metrics, like ice thickness, which may give us better insight into the overall condition of the ice pack, especially during years like 2026 when it is very fragmented”.
(In March 2026, Arctic sea ice reached its peak extent for this winter, clocking in as the joint-smallest in a satellite record going back almost half a century.)
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The post ‘Concerning’ low sea ice persists as Antarctic hits third-lowest winter peak appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Concerning’ low sea ice persists as Antarctic hits third-lowest winter peak
Participants at COP31 in Antalya will have a “duty” not to interfere in Türkiye’s internal affairs under the country’s hosting deal with the UN, reviving a clause dropped for last year’s climate summit in Brazil that human rights groups warn could put activists at risk.
Türkiye has faced growing criticism from human rights groups over the jailing of opposition figures, journalists and activists and imposed a blanket protest ban around July’s summit of the NATO military alliance in Ankara.
The contested provision is included in the binding agreement between the UN climate secretariat and the Turkish government that sets out responsibilities over logistical arrangements and details participants’ rights and obligations.
The document, signed in June but only made public on Wednesday, gives accredited COP31 attendees immunity from legal action over what they say, write or do in connection with the conference. Climate Home News understands that this safeguard can be applied to what takes place both inside and, in certain circumstances, outside of the UN-controlled COP “Blue Zone”. For the first time, this protection explicitly continues after the summit ends.
But participants enjoying these “privileges and immunities” also have a duty to respect Türkiye’s laws and regulations and not to interfere in its internal affairs, the agreement states. Rights groups fear its wide-ranging formulation could be used to discourage criticism of the host government.
Climate Home News understands that whether an action is covered by the immunity or infringes on the host’s internal affairs would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with close coordination between the country’s authorities and the UN climate change body.
A separate provision states that immunity shall be waived where the UN believes it would “impede the course of justice”.
‘Chilling effect’
Those same provisions featured in the host country agreements for COP28 in the United Arab Emirates and COP29 in Azerbaijan, both regarded as authoritarian regimes, before being dropped for COP30 in Brazil.
Ann Harrison, climate justice policy advisor at Amnesty International, said it is “extremely disappointing” that the COP31 agreement re-introduced clauses that could “hinder the ability of human rights defenders and civil society organisations to conduct their work safely”.
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She added the provisions could have a “wider chilling effect” on rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, given concerns over the human rights situation in Türkiye, including laws that “have shrunk civic space” and their “abusive” implementation by authorities.
The UN climate change body declined to comment.
Rights groups have documented blanket protest bans, unlawful use of force by the police and prosecutions of journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers across Türkiye in the last year.
Arrests and protest bans
Last July, environmental activist Esra Işık was sentenced to more than two years for “resisting” a public official over what Amnesty International described as a peaceful protest against an urgent expropriation order linked to the expansion of coal mining in south-western Türkiye. She is appealing the conviction.
Ahead of a summit of the NATO alliance in the capital Ankara in July, authorities put in place a 13-day blanket ban on demonstrations, citing “national security”, and arrested over 200 people. Human Rights Watch said the crackdown showed Türkiye’s “ruthless intolerance of freedom of speech and assembly”.
Earlier this month, Turkish police detained dozens of people as part of what rights groups described as the government’s widening crackdown on LGBTQ+ activists and venues.
Questioned by media as to how he would guarantee the right to protest at COP31, Kurum said earlier in September that his team would “try to meet” any request they receive from civil society and give them “a free space to express themselves”.
“Don’t worry, thinking you will not be able to voice your opinions or really share your thoughts,” he said in an attempt to reassure campaigners, adding that he had put former deputy environment minister Mehmet Birpinar in charge of liaising with civil society.
Civic space needed
Camilla Pollera, human rights and climate change campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said meaningful participation at COP31 is fundamental to the legitimacy of climate action.
“At a climate summit, civil society participation necessarily includes being present, speaking out, scrutinising governments’ decisions and climate policies, and advocating for communities most vulnerable to climate change,” she added.
At last year’s COP30 summit, thousands of Indigenous people and climate activists peacefully marched through the Amazonian city of Belém in the first major demonstration outside the UN venue in four years. Smaller-scale demonstrations were largely confined to the “Blue Zone” at COP27 in Egypt, COP28 in the UAE and COP29 in Azerbaijan.
In two other separate incidents in Belém, members of the Munduruku tribe blocked access to the conference centre for hours, demanding an end to development projects in their ancestral land, and protesters stormed through the venue clashing with UN security officials.
The COP31 hosting agreement keeps some of the safeguards previously hailed by civil society groups. The government and the UN secretariat commit to upholding “the fundamental human rights” of all participants in the agreement’s preamble.
Under the deal, Türkiye also needs to ensure that security personnel follow “the highest ethical and professional standards and are expected to behave with integrity and respect”.
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COP31 attendees told not to interfere in Türkiye’s “internal affairs”
As rising seas submerge growing swathes of land, countries that lose territory should still keep their national boundaries, sovereign rights and UN membership, according to a political declaration adopted at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday.
The declaration, which was championed by climate-vulnerable small island states, affirms “the presumption in favour of continued statehood” in the face of sea level rise fuelled by climate change, and urges countries to work together to assist communities affected by encroaching oceans.
Speaking at a high-level UN meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise, Cabo Verde’s Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho, one of the initiative’s co-facilitators along with Australia, said the adoption of the text by consensus sends “a message of hope”.
“This declaration has a very special meaning. For us, sea level rise is neither a distant threat nor a theoretical concern,” he said, adding that rising seas put at risk key infrastructure, water resources and economic growth in small island states.
In the Pacific, sea levels have risen at twice the global rate, dramatically increasing coastal flooding events from two to 20 a year in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and from zero to 102 events per year in American Samoa, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Surangel Whipps Jr., president of the Pacific island of Palau, said the summit in New York represents a “moment of international solidarity”, and highlighted that small island states will remain permanent members of the UN.
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Declaration recognises statehood
An advisory opinion by the world’s top maritime court, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), first upheld in 2024 that countries do not have to shrink their maritime borders even if they lose land territory due to sea level rise. This was reiterated by the International Court of Justice in last year’s landmark ruling on the climate obligations of states.
The new declaration endorsed by all governments at the UN General Assembly stresses that sea level rise “is not a distant scenario but a real and lived experience for many”, and notes that international law must be implemented in global responses to rising seas.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the “milestone must now be translated into action”, adding that the declaration should encourage an “ongoing dialogue” at the “highest possible level” leading to practical outcomes. Pacific islands have proposed an international treaty on sea level rise that would provide more legal certainty.
“Those on the frontlines must be front and centre on every decision. We cannot allow countries and cultures to vanish beneath the waves,” he said. “The SOS has gone out. The world must answer.”
At regional summit, Pacific islands ask for COP31 support for clean energy and finance
Goodwin Friday, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said measures to protect vulnerable states will require adequate finance. “Investing in resilience now is more cost-effective than paying the far greater price for loss and damage later,” he added.
Championed by Australia’s COP31 co-presidency, Pacific islands have sought to put adaptation to sea level rise and ocean conservation at the top of the political agenda by inviting world leaders to attend the pre-COP31 summit co-hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu in October.
Tuvalu will also host the second global fossil fuel phase-out summit in April 2027, after around 60 governments met this year in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss ending their dependence on coal, oil and gas.
“Our coastlines, our reefs and our communities are living with the consequences of fossil fuel dependence every day, and our people have earned the right to help shape the way forward,” Lynda Tabuya, Fiji’s climate minister, said in a statement announcing details of the conference.
Ocean monitoring gets a boost in New York
Amid record-breaking marine heat and seas rising at unprecedented speed, governments in New York announced new commitments to protect the world’s ocean, as efforts to bolster marine ecosystems and coastal communities rise up the political agenda.
On Wednesday, the EU and Canada announced more funding for a new Europe-led ocean monitoring system called OceanEye, launched in the aftermath of a failed attempt by the Trump administration to dismantle the largest existing network of deep-sea observatories.
During an event at UN headquarters in New York, EU President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced around $163 million in new funding for the initiative, with the EU pledging €92 million ($105m) on top of existing seed funding and Canada pledging C$82 million (US$58m) over five years.
According to an EU statement, while OceanEye will collaborate with the Global Ocean Observing System, that network “remains vulnerable to financial shortfalls and geopolitical disruptions”. A group of 30 countries from Europe, Africa and the Americas joined an international initiative in support of OceanEye, including large coastal nations like Brazil, Namibia and Mexico.
Von der Leyen said OceanEye “can make us the leading ocean data provider in a matter of years”, including by launching new satellites and installing new observatories in the deep ocean. “From outer space to the deepest ocean, our funding helps us keep watch beneath the waves,” she added.
Carney said the initiative would help protect Canada’s Arctic region with real-time monitoring operating year-round. “We can’t protect what we can’t see,” he said, also highlighting that Canada had expanded conservation of its ocean territory from 1% a decade ago to 15% now.
In New York, a group of 19 countries said they are either developing or implementing plans to sustainably manage all of their ocean territory, with 12 new nations joining the initiative. In a joint communiqué, they called on more countries to sign up ahead of COP31.
Warnings of El Niño-fuelled extreme heat
Scientists and world leaders have raised the alarm over this year’s record-breaking marine temperatures, which have persisted above historical peaks for more than 100 days as the naturally occurring El Niño phenomenon intensifies in the Pacific.
Extreme ocean heat could become a threat to coastal ecosystems and communities, experts fear. Water temperatures 1.5C above normal levels have also rapidly fuelled a strong hurricane in the Pacific in recent days.
Despite scientific calls for additional ocean conservation efforts, a report launched this week in New York warned that efforts to protect ocean ecosystems are lagging behind, with only 10% of the global ocean covered by conservation areas and just 3.5% designated as “effectively protected”.
The post Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood appeared first on Climate Home News.
Threatened by rising seas, small islands secure right to keep their statehood
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