UK slashes climate aid programmes for developing countries | Climate crisis

UK programs to protect nature and the climate in developing countries are facing drastic budget cuts despite ministers’ promises, the Guardian has learned.

The cuts belie the government’s claims that it is meeting its international climate finance obligations and are hidden behind a system that experts have called opaque.

Several programs intended to protect nature in vital ecosystems in Africa and Asia have in fact been canceled. Other programs have seen their scope reduced, weakening their impact.

An initiative, the £500m Blue Planet Fund – set up after Sir David Attenborough’s revelations about the plight of the marine environment in his Blue Planet series sparked public concern – is also being called into question.

The cuts have not been publicly revealed and are hidden amid a chronic lack of transparency in climate aid spending. The Guardian discovered:

• The abolition and partial closure of the £100 million Biodiversity Fund, intended to protect nature in vital ecosystems in impoverished overseas regions. Six regions were initially targeted, in Africa, South America and Asia, but this number was reduced to two.

• Coast – a project for adaptation to climate and oceans and sustainable transition – and Pact (Preparing and accelerating climate transitions) are undergoing substantial reductions.

• The future of the £500 million Blue Planet Fund has been thrown into doubt despite its successful operation.

• Other programs have been reduced in scope, such as only allowing one year of funding where years were expected.

• Freedom of Information Act data requests revealed that spending has been cut among departments responsible for international climate finance (ICF).

These projects should have been worth hundreds of millions of pounds, but are likely to be reduced significantly, in some cases by more than half. It is difficult to accurately assess budget cuts because there is no transparent government system for reporting the ICF. Responses to FoI requests, seen by the Guardian, revealed significant data on nature-related spending, but the government has not produced any project-level data since 2020.

For the five years to the end of March 2026, the government should have spent £11.6 billion on the ICF to help developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and deal with the impacts of climate change, of which £3 billion would go towards protecting nature.

The Guardian has already revealed that the government plans to cut future spending on the ICF by more than a fifth, to £9bn over the next five years, which experts say is not in line with an international commitment from developed countries including the UK to triple the global ICF to $300bn a year by 2035.

The initial commitment to spend £11.6 billion on the ICF from 2021 to 2026 was made by Boris Johnson in 2021 ahead of the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow.

At least £2 billion of this sum is likely to come from an accounting change made by the last Conservative government, whereby 30% of any aid spending on the world’s least developed countries can be counted as ICF, even if it does not have explicit climate or nature components. This could help meet the £11.6 billion commitment while cutting climate and nature programs.

Jonathan Hall, of Conservation International UK, said the government was failing to live up to voters’ expectations. “Polls show that protecting rainforests, oceans and wildlife is a very popular use of the UK’s aid budget, but the government appears set to abandon these financial commitments, just as the Green party wins its first ever by-election,” he said.

“The UK’s support for international nature must be maintained as a proportion of the international climate budget. A radical improvement in transparency is also needed, so that the British public can see and be proud of the iconic ecosystems from Attenborough’s documentaries that UK funds protect, and understand the huge impacts of budget cuts on these environments and their local communities.”

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office declined to answer questions about individual funds and spending. “The UK remains on track to deliver at least £11.6 billion of ICF by the end of March 2026,” a spokesperson said. “We continue to publish regular and transparent information to enable people in the UK and around the world to track our progress, and we will publish ODA. [overseas development aid] soon, the allocations for the next three years.

Several people familiar with the workings of some of the funds, who could not be named, said the money was not being distributed and some was being cut. A common complaint was that funding was dribbled out, distributed one year at a time, with no guarantee of a future, which limited the organizations’ ability to plan and jeopardized the employment of local workers needed to carry out the projects.

Adrian Gahan of Campaign for Nature, one of the co-creators of the UK Nature Finance Tracker, said: “Inspired by David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, the UK government spent five years creating the Blue Planet Fund which helps protect the world’s oceans, marine life and the communities that depend on them. Sadly, on Attenborough’s 100th birthday, it appears the government is considering ending the scheme. Given the importance of healthy oceans for economic and social stability in much of the world, this is remarkably short-sighted. We urge the government to provide clarity that the Blue Planet Fund is secure and will continue to be funded over the next five years.

A group of 85 civil society organizations have written to Keir Starmer asking him to step in and increase climate finance, raising money by taxing fossil fuel producers, a strategy that polls show would be popular with voters. In a letter seen by the Guardian, they say: “[Cutting climate finance] would be a massive betrayal of the countries and communities on the frontline of the climate crisis and of your government’s manifesto commitments to the British public to be a leader on climate and create a world without poverty on a liveable planet. The UK’s delivery of the ICF is absolutely essential to meeting these manifesto commitments.

They add that the government could raise tens of billions of pounds a year by taxing oil and gas companies, redirecting subsidies away from fossil fuels, and from the richest who are responsible for a disproportionate share of carbon emissions, for example through taxes on frequent flyers and taxes on private jets.

Catherine Pettengell, executive director of the Climate Action Network UK, which authored the letter, said: “Public polling tells us that the British public believe that huge profits from fossil fuels and luxury travel should be taxed to pay for the damage they are doing to our climate. If we did this, the government could raise tens of billions of pounds a year to fund climate action at home and abroad, driving down food prices and better protect us all from the costly impacts of climate change. Yet the richest and largest polluters continue to get by and make profits, while those who did the least to cause the climate crisis bear the greatest costs. This must change.

Ministers were warned last year in a report by the heads of the UK’s intelligence service, the Joint Intelligence Committee, that the collapse of ecosystems in vulnerable parts of the world – including the Amazon and the extinction of coral reefs – could have serious consequences for the UK’s national security and lead to food shortages, unrest and war.