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
A report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Springmount Advisory reveals the untapped green economic opportunity for Western Australia in a declining Asian gas market, which also offers a genuine solution for decarbonisation in Asia.
Is Western Australia clinging to a fading gas industry while a thriving green future passes it by? As major Asian trading partners rapidly pivot away from volatile gas imports toward cheap solar and battery storage, this report exposes a high-stakes choice: risk becoming stranded in an oversupplied fossil fuel market, or harness WA’s unmatched sun and wind to lead the global clean energy transition.
Summary
From Gas to Green: Building Western Australia’s Future State reveals that Western Australia (WA) faces a critical juncture as falling Asian gas demand, geopolitical gas supply volatility and accelerating renewable energy deployment undermine the long-term economic viability of gas exports. By harnessing its world-class wind and solar resources, the report demonstrates that WA can execute an orderly phase-out of gas and pioneer a green commodity export economy that could generate $987 billion in economic value by 2060, create 24,000 ongoing jobs, and drive a 9.6% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Key Findings
- Gas demand is falling in Asia – WA can no longer rely on gas exports: Gas demand in core Asian markets fell in 2025 and is projected to continue to decline in 2026. Legislated energy plans in Japan, South Korea, and China now prioritise renewables and nuclear over gas.
- Asia is increasing renewables, importing gas just gets in the way: Evidence from markets like Thailand suggests that gas imports are increasingly crowding out cheaper renewable energy investments and battery storage rather than displacing coal, locking in more emissions over time.
- Green commodities offer a real solution to decarbonise Asia – this is a major win for WA: With world-class renewables, WA can lead Australia’s green commodity exports, which by 2060 could be worth almost a trillion dollars ($987 billion) and support a genuine 9.6% reduction in global emissions.
Recommendations to WA government
Recommendation 1: Plan an orderly gas phase-out aligned with a trading partner pivot plan
Implement a managed, orderly phase-out of gas exports aligned with trading partners’ decarbonisation pathways, rather than waiting for demand to collapse, by:
- Developing and implementing a staged phase-out of gas facilities aligned with feedstock supply expiry or typical end of facility lifespans.
- Committing to no new gas development for gas expansion, including Browse and Kimberley fields.
- Developing new, reciprocal trade relationships with existing gas trade partners, structured to progressively replace gas exports with green commodities – integrated with recommendation 2.
Recommendation 2: Develop an integrated green commodity export strategy, positioning WA as a global green iron manufacturing hub
Establish an integrated green commodity export strategy that immediately prioritises green iron development, positioning WA as a global green iron manufacturing hub, by:
- Committing to green commodity export targets to give industry and investors a clear demand signal.
- Prioritising green iron as the lead sector within the broader green commodity strategy, given WA’s iron ore endowment and first-mover potential.
Recommendation 3: Reject false solutions such as carbon dumping (CCS) and blue hydrogen
Reject carbon dumping (also described as carbon capture and storage, or CCS) and blue hydrogen as viable decarbonisation technologies, and prioritise green hydrogen and proven renewables for clean energy and fuel production by:
- Excluding blue hydrogen projects (and CCS-dependent projects) from all government support programs.
- Requiring existing hydrogen-based production (including ammonia, methanol, synthetic fuels) to have clear, near-term transition timelines to switch to green hydrogen production.
What you can do
Together, we can push for a prosperous green future.
You can help by:
- Sending an email to Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling on them to reject Browse.
- Sharing this story to help more Australians understand what’s at stake.
- Encouraging your friends and family to take action.
REPORT: “From Gas to Green” Building Western Australia’s Future State
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
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UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss