Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu Close The UK has supported around 500 climate projects since 2021 UK climate aid has reached record levels – but is set to drop Afghanistan received more bilateral climate aid than any other country Development banks and private-sector funders are among the biggest beneficiaries Methodology The UK has spent £12.8bn on climate aid for developing countries since 2021, according to official figures obtained by Carbon Brief. Freedom-of-information (FOI) requests reveal how the UK has used its ‘climate finance’ to support everything from solar projects in Mozambique to carbon offsets in the Amazon. UK climate funding, which reached a record £4bn this year, has supported roughly 500 aid projects, climate funds and private-investment initiatives over the past five years. With this spending, the UK has surpassed its £11.6bn climate-finance target for this period, although Carbon Brief analysis shows that it has partly relied on ‘questionable accounting’. This target is part of the UK’s ongoing responsibility under UN climate treaties to financially support developing countries in their efforts to tackle climate change. Despite being central to its international climate policy, the UK government does not routinely release data on progress towards its climate-finance goals. Here, Carbon Brief has published the data in full for the first time and pulled out key trends since 2021. The UK has supported around 500 climate projects since 2021 According to the FOI data obtained by Carbon Brief, at least 493 projects, funds and institutions received UK climate finance between 2021-22 and 2025-26. These included £45m to help Ukraine curb its reliance on fossil fuels, £40m in cash transfers for Kenyans affected by drought and £30m to provide flood resilience in Nepal. Larger sums were provided to projects spread across multiple countries, often with the stated goal of ‘mobilising’ additional finance from the private sector. For example, the UK channelled £198m into a World Bank-backed project to help Colombia, Cambodia and others create and sell ‘high-integrity’ carbon offsets. The UK also provided £229m to a group that uses foreign aid to attract private capital for projects in predominantly low-income nations, such as a solar farm in Uganda and a ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ project in Pakistan. All of the funded projects can be viewed in the interactive table below. The UK has been criticised by campaigners and MPs for its lack of transparency around climate finance data. In line with its international obligations, the government routinely releases its climate-finance figures to the UN – albeit with a two-year delay. However, it does not publish this data broken down by financial year, making it impossible to accurately gauge progress towards the £11.6bn goal. The data gathered by Carbon Brief is therefore the most comprehensive attempt to track this information to date. Carbon Brief has been periodically tracking this data since 2017. UK climate aid has reached record levels – but is set to drop The UK government committed in 2019 to spending £11.6bn of the nation’s aid budget on ‘climate finance’, between 2021-22 and 2025-26. This is the nation’s contribution to an international goal to mobilise $100bn of climate finance a year between 2020 and 2025. Developed countries are obliged under UN climate treaties to financially support developing countries, assisting their efforts to cut emissions and adapt to climate change. However, alongside other major donors, such as the US, the UK has dramatically cut its aid budget, placing significant strain on the nation’s climate finance. Despite this, FOI data shows that UK climate finance reached a record £4bn in 2025-26, as shown in the chart below. Not accounting for inflation, this amounts to a tenfold increase from 2011-12, when the UK started providing climate finance. The £11.6bn target was met comfortably, with £12.8bn provided over the five-year period. However, as separate Carbon Brief analysis shows, the target was only met due to the government reclassifying £2.2bn of existing foreign aid as climate finance, without spending any more. Rather than setting a new five-year goal, in March 2026 the Labour government committed to spending ‘around £6bn’ of UK aid as climate finance over the next three years. On average, this would mean £2bn in climate aid annually – roughly half the level achieved in the financial year 2025-26. EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.Free weekly newsletter Email This amounts to a significant reduction from the £11.6bn pledge, especially once accounting changes and inflation are factored in, as Carbon Brief analysis shows. Alongside the £6bn in climate aid, the government has also pledged to invest £6.7bn from outside the aid budget to ‘drive climate and nature outcomes’. Rather than grant funding, this support will include private investments, export credit and guarantees to development banks. The UK already provides such finance, but has not previously counted it towards its climate-finance targets. Afghanistan received more bilateral climate aid than any other country The vast majority of UK climate finance was delivered ‘multilaterally’, meaning it supports large funds or institutions working in multiple countries. More than 80% of the funding since 2021 is therefore listed as helping ‘developing countries’ in general, or whole regions such as ‘Africa’. Of the £2.1bn (17%) that was delivered ‘bilaterally’, with the UK directly supporting climate projects in specific countries, the biggest beneficiaries are nations in east Africa and south Asia. Around two-thirds of this funding goes to nations classified as ‘least developed’. For many years, Ethiopia has been the top recipient of bilateral UK climate finance, largely due to long-running projects supporting ecosystem restoration and drought resilience. However, Afghanistan overtook Ethiopia over the £11.6bn period, with £256m of its aid labelled as climate-related, compared to Ethiopia’s £226m. (The UK does not provide aid via the Taliban, instead channelling it through partners, such as UN agencies.) Afghanistan is struggling with floods and low electricity access. However, the UK’s apparent surge in support for the nation is not, in fact, due to new climate-related initiatives. Instead, it is the result of the UK automatically labelling 30% of aid for all humanitarian projects in this country as ‘climate finance’, following a controversial accounting change. This shift affected other climate-vulnerable and war-torn nations, meaning Somalia (£139m), Sudan (£136m) and Yemen (£130m) were also among the top recipients of ‘climate aid’. Where the UK has provided large sums of climate finance to projects in middle-income nations, they are typically aimed at ‘mobilising’ private-sector investment, rather than achieving humanitarian goals. Examples include £83m to support Brazil’s Amazon Fund – a carbon offsetting initiative – and £43m to boost UK investment in India’s low-carbon infrastructure. Development banks and private-sector funders are among the biggest beneficiaries The largest chunks of UK climate finance are channelled via international climate funds and other bodies, which in turn use that funding to support climate projects in developing countries. Despite recently cutting its 2024-27 support for the Green Climate Fund, the UK still provided £1.5bn to this flagship UN fund – more than any other initiative. British International Investment (BII), a publicly owned, for-profit company that invests in developing-country businesses and is partially supported with UK aid money, received almost £1.4bn. The UK has increasingly been relying on BII to meet its climate-finance goals, partly reflecting the body’s decision to prioritise clean-energy investments, rather than fossil fuels. Other major recipients of UK climate finance are multilateral development banks, particularly the various arms of the World Bank and the African Development Bank. This reflects the UK’s decision to start counting ‘core’ funding for these banks as climate finance. The government’s accounting changes – which have boosted the significance of BII and MDBs in UK climate finance – have faced criticism from experts, MPs and the UK’s aid watchdog. For more, see Carbon Brief’s full analysis of these changes. Methodology All of the international climate-finance data used in this piece was obtained via FOI requests. Carbon Brief has compiled the data into a spreadsheet, which can be accessed here. UK climate finance comes from the aid budgets of four departments, with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) providing three-quarters of the total. The remainder comes predominantly from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), with much smaller sums from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST). BIST has also released a dataset detailing the hundreds of climate-science projects in developing countries – or benefiting those countries – that have been supported with UK climate funds. UK climate-finance figures have been subject to regular revisions. While this analysis is based on final figures provided via FOI requests in recent months, it is possible that departments will still change the figures in future releases. Related Revealed: UK relied on £2bn of ‘questionable accounting’ to hit its climate-aid goal 28.10.2026 UK policy Q&A: Why are UK energy bills so high – and how could they be lowered? 27.10.2026 Oil and gas Guest post: Greenland ice sheet shrinks for 30th year in a row 27.10.2026 Greenland Chart: A record two-thirds of car sales in China are now electric vehicles 23.10.2026 China policy The post Analysis: How the UK spent more than £11.6bn on climate aid since 2021 appeared first on Carbon Brief.