The UK will cut overseas climate spending by more than 10% to fund higher defence budgets, despite agreeing to a global pledge to triple climate finance for developing countries by 2035.
Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper told the British parliament on Thursday that the UK will “aim to spend around £6 billion ($8bn)” on international climate finance over the next three years, covering emissions reductions, adaptation and nature.
This amounts to around £2 billion ($2.66 billion) a year in the next three years, about 13% less than the £2.3 billion ($3.05 billion) a year pledged by the previous Conservative government for the period from 2021-22 to 2025-26.
The move places the UK alongside several other European countries that have recently cut aid budgets, despite a COP29 agreement to mobilise $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. In the United States, President Trump has gone further, cancelling most overseas aid programmes, with climate projects among the hardest hit.
The UK cuts were slammed by climate campaigners and some opposition politicians as “brutal”, a “betrayal” of the government’s election promises to be a climate leader, and a failure to recognise that development and climate spending protect the UK’s national security.
The UK will also aim to deliver an additional £6.7 billion ($8.9 billion) in “UK backed climate and nature investments” and to mobilise billions more in private finance, Cooper said. She added that those investments would include measures to help countries to recover when disasters hit, for example, as risk insurance in Jamaica enabled rapid payouts following Hurricane Melissa.
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Cooper said that the cuts were a “hugely difficult decision” and “not ideological”. But, she added, they were necessary “to deliver the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War”.
She reiterated Labour’s commitment to restore development spending to 0.7% of gross national income “when fiscal circumstances allow”, but did not provide a timeline when pressed by an opposition member of parliament (MP). UK aid was reduced from 0.7% to 0.5% by the previous Conservative government in 2021, and is now set to fall further to 0.3%.
Cooper told the sparsely-attended parliament session that “allies such as Germany, France and Sweden have made similar choices” to cut aid to fund defence. The US has also cut almost all of its climate finance.
Cuts open to legal challenge?
These cuts come despite governments agreeing at the COP29 climate summit in 2024 to aim for $300 billion a year of climate finance by 2035, up from the $100 billion a year target for 2025.
Last year, the International Court of Justice advised that developed countries must provide climate finance “in a manner and at a level that allow for the achievement of” the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target temperature limit, language that campaigners say could underpin future legal challenges.
Reaction to Cooper’s announcement in parliament was mixed. Scottish National Party MP Chris Law called the aid cuts “the steepest, deepest and most brutal of any G7 country”, even “astonishingly” going further than the Trump administration.
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Sarah Champion, an MP from Cooper’s Labour Party but who is not in government, said she had seen a yet-to-be-published equalities impact assessment. These assesments determine how different demographic groups – like women and disabled people – will be affected.
“When that comes into the public domain, we’ll then have the information that we can maybe have an informed debate on”, she said, adding that pitching defence against international development was a “false dichotomy”.
“If you ask any military person, they will tell you the best line of prevention and first defence is our development money,” she added.
Liberal Democrat and Green MPs echoed the argument, describing climate change as a central threat to global and UK security.
Conservative Party development spokesperson Wendy Morton questioned why Cooper had labelled climate change be a priority given “the country faces serious fiscal constraints”.
“Should not our first priority be economic resilience and national security, including global health security?”, she asked.
MPs from Reform UK, which is leading the national polls, did not speak in parliament. But, in November, they proposed cutting the aid budget by about 90% to £1 billion ($1.3bn) a year.
Campaigners slam “betrayal”
Climate campaigners were critical of the government’s cuts. Hannah Bond and Taahra Ghazi, co-CEOs of ActionAid UK, said cuts to climate finance were “a huge betrayal for women and girls on the frontline of the climate crisis”.
Catherine Pettengell, head of Climate Action Network UK, said that “the government promised the UK public in its manifesto to be a climate leader and create a world free from poverty on a liveable planet – but today’s announcements leave those promises entirely unfilled”.
Gareth Redmond-King of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit argued the decision runs counter to warnings from security and food system experts.
He added that climate finance is an investment in the UK’s national security given that “we import two-fifths of our food from overseas, and worsening climate change impacts hitting farmers at home and abroad are leading to shortages and higher prices on our supermarket shelves”.
The post UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead appeared first on Climate Home News.
UK cuts support for climate action abroad to fund military instead
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.