President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US overseas aid budget are fuelling concern in African communities about how they will deal with the worsening impacts of climate change, as Climate Home found when visiting a now-halted project in Malawi that protected forests and provided poorer, rural people with ways of making money that enabled them to cope better with drought.
Malawians in the areas that benefited from the USAID-backed programme criticised the decision. The chair of Mbatamile village’s natural resources management committee, Lucia Kasimu, said: “It is our plea that the US government rescind its decision – to help the poor. It is their money we know, but this will leave many people suffering from climate change.”
Since 2019, the Modern Cooking for Healthy Forests Accelerator (MCHF) programme – co-funded by the UK – has been teaching people in Salima district to make stoves that use less firewood, cultivate mangoes, produce honey from bee-keeping and grow trees, whose wood they can use or sell.
But a spokesperson for American consulting firm Tetra Tech, which led the MCHF project, told Climate Home last month it was “under a stop-work order from USAID until further notice”, after Trump implemented a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance, including climate projects, on his first day in office.
Drought resilience
Last year, drought killed thousands of cattle across Southern Africa, including in Malawi, as there was not enough grass and water to sustain them. The vice-chair of Mbatmile’s resources committee, Enock Joseph, said the skills taught by theforest programme allowed villagers to earn additional income and buy food when drought or other climate–driven disasters strike.
“Animals are dying due to drought and people are suffering as a result of climate change. Salima is prone to drought – and when there is hunger, people rely on these economic activities to survive,” he said.
With more efficient cookstoves, the project also aimed to reduce demand for firewood in a bid to protect Malawi’s forests. Almost all Malawian households depend on wood or charcoal for cooking and heating. The MCHF also supported the government’s national forest inventory, which tracks levels of forest cover.
An efficient cookstove (left). Charcoal for sale along the road in Malawi (below).
Joseph said nobody else would be trained to produce cookstoves, honey or mangoes and patrols to stop logging in Thuma forest would end, warning that tree-cutting for charcoal was likely to increase.
He told Climate Home it was wrong for the US to cut aid so abruptly, leaving recipients and employees out of pocket in a food crisis. “For the project to end just like this is like removing an oxygen supply machine from a patient in an ICU so that he dies quickly,” Joseph added.
Tetra Tech declined to comment further. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office did not comment on its specific support for the MCHF project but told Climate Home it is working “to assess the implications of the US funding pause across development programmes”.
While Trump had criticised USAID in general before winning the presidential election, there was no indication he would immediately freeze its spending or launch drastic cuts so rapidly.
Since he took power, his administration has said in court filings it will try to slash over 90% of the foreign aid agency’s budget – although it remains unclear if that effort will be successful, given that USAID’s budget is controlled largely by Congress.
After Trump’s move, the UK followed suit by announcing plans to slash its aid budget from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%. Germany, France, the Netherlands and several other European nations have also proposed aid cuts in recent months.
Trump’s cuts to USAID projects are hurting communities in the Global South, particularly in Africa. Bloomberg reported that US has scrapped support for the Power Africa programme, which provided grants for renewable energy on the continent, and the World Food Programme this week said it would have to close its Southern Africa office in Johannesburg in expectation of US and European funding cuts.
The US has also ended its participation in – and financing for – the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, which aimed to shift South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam from coal to clean energy. German Development State Secretary Jochen Flasbarth said the US move was “regrettable” but with European nations, Canada and Japan still involved he was “convinced” the partnerships would be successful.
But Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, told Climate Home that USAID cuts will have not only humanitarian impacts on people but also “huge security and geopolitical consequences”.
“I understand if there is a political will to change the policies in USA,” he said. “However, I can’t understand the way the cut was done. Funding commitments were cancelled and contracts broken. This way of closing down is disrupting the work of local organisations, and development actors.”
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Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’:Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
The more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The followingyears saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Ocean dialogue breakout group. Credit: IISD/ENB, Maja Schmidt-Thomé.
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
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