Analysis: UK must spend £1.7bn more on nature by 2026 to meet climate-finance goal

The UK will need to almost double the climate finance it gives for nature conservation annually in order to meet one of its flagship international targets, according to Carbon Brief analysis of data released under freedom of information (FOI) rules.

As part of the UK’s pledge to provide £11.6bn of climate aid between 2021 and 2026, the previous Conservative government promised that £3bn of this money would be used to protect nature and, specifically, £1.5bn of that would be for forests.

A series of FOI requests and additional analysis by Carbon Brief reveal that the UK spent an average of around £450m each year on nature for the first three years of the commitment. 

This will need to rise to more than £800m a year for the next two years to hit the target, amounting to nearly £1.7bn by 2026.

The new Labour government has made much of the “fiscal constraints” it is facing in office. Years of cuts to the foreign aid budget under the Conservatives have threatened the UK’s climate finance targets.

Senior Labour ministers, including foreign secretary David Lammy in a speech last week, have said they will stick to the £11.6bn goal. However, so far, they have not committed to the sub-goals set by their predecessors. When asked by Carbon Brief, the government did not confirm if the sub-goals would be honoured.

In the FOI responses, the government said it would “consider all spending plans inherited from the last government” as it undertook its spending review, which is set to conclude in spring next year.

Nature and forests

In 2019, the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson committed to spending £11.6bn on climate finance between 2021-22 and 2025-26. This is the UK share of the annual $100bn that developed countries agreed to give to developing countries from 2020.

At the start of 2021, the same government pledged to spend £3bn of the £11.6bn goal on “climate change solutions that protect and restore nature and biodiversity”. It said the money would support various projects, including marine conservation, tackling the illegal timber trade and conserving mangroves.

Later that year, as the UK hosted the COP26 climate summit, the government announced that £1.5bn of its climate finance – half of the £3bn nature target – would specifically support efforts to “halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation”.

This funding was part of the “global forest finance pledge”, which, in turn, was a significant announcement at COP26, where the UK had centred nature as one of its key themes.

These sub-goals have received less attention than the overarching £11.6bn target, which came under pressure during Rishi Sunak’s leadership. Notably, Sunak’s government changed the rules for calculating climate finance, making it easier for the UK to meet its goals.

Nevertheless, the Conservative government had retained its commitment to nature and forests, telling the Environment Audit Committee earlier this year, while still in power, that it “remained steadfast” in its commitment to the forest target.

Scaling up

Three years into the five years covered by its climate finance pledge, the UK has provided £1.34bn of climate finance for nature, of which £590m has gone to forest projects, according to Carbon Brief’s figures.

This means the UK has met around 45% of each sub-target, with only two years remaining to make up the remainder.

To meet these targets, the UK would, therefore, have to accelerate its spending on nature and forests in order to provide the remaining 55% in two years. 

As the chart below shows, nature funding has steadily increased since the target was set in 2021 – a trend that would need to continue over the next two years in order to meet the goal. 

This is in line with broader spending to meet UK climate finance targets, which tends to be “backloaded”, with more spending towards the end of each five-year period.

The UK provided, on average, £448m of nature finance each year from 2021, and needs to raise this to £828m, on average, in each of the periods 2024-25 and 2025-26 to reach £3bn.

A large chunk of nature funding given to date is money that the government has paid into large international funds, particularly the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Reasoning that the GCF supports nature-related activities, the government has been marking 40% of its GCF contributions as nature finance – accounting for around a quarter of the total nature finance over the past three years.

Other big recipients so far include a project working with forest communities in Colombia, efforts to address water scarcity in the Middle East and international initiatives based on “public-private partnerships” and “market reforms” to avert deforestation.

As for forests specifically, climate finance for them has also increased. The UK has provided, on average, £222m each year, and needs to raise this to £417m, on average, in each of the periods 2024-25 and 2025-26 to hit its £1.5bn pledge.

These figures are based predominantly on FOI responses from the three major departments responsible for the UK’s overseas climate-related development projects: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO); the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

Earlier this month, Carbon Brief obtained FOI responses with figures for DESNZ and Defra covering all three years from 2021-22 to 2023-24.

Defra noted that its figures for 2023-24 were “provisional as they have not been finalised”. Separately, DESNZ also provided some additional numbers for payments into international funds that were not included in the original FOI response.

The figures for FCDO 2021-22 and 2022-23 come from another FOI response, provided in March of this year, and not including 2023-24 data. Carbon Brief understands that the figures for FCDO in 2023-24 have not yet been finalised within the department.

The 2023-24 FCDO figures are, therefore, estimates, based on Carbon Brief analysis of all UK-backed climate finance projects provided in another FOI request earlier this year. (Carbon Brief calculated the share of climate finance the government deemed relevant for nature and forests in projects that are known to count towards these sub-goals.)

This means the FCDO figure for 2023-24 will not include any new nature projects that started in that year. Also, in some cases, the share of nature funding from each project may change from year to year, which would affect the final numbers. (It is worth noting that project shares for nature tended to remain very stable between 2021-22 and 2022-23.)

‘Difficult choices’

Senior ministers including net-zero secretary Ed Miliband and foreign secretary David Lammy have said the UK remains committed to the £11.6bn goal under Labour.

In a speech delivered last week at Kew Gardens in London, Lammy emphasised the UK’s role in providing climate aid to developing countries and said “we must unlock much, much more climate and nature finance”.

However, he also said that his government was operating during “times of fiscal constraint” and alluded to the difficulty of achieving the UK’s existing climate finance goals:

“The reality is that the British contribution to this [$100bn climate finance] target was a promise which the Tories casually made, but for which they did not have a plan. In contrast, my focus is on how we can actually deliver that promise, given the dire financial inheritance from the last government. Ahead of the spending review, we’re carefully reviewing our plans to do so.”

Lammy appeared to leave some flexibility for the government by emphasising that climate finance commitments were in the hands of the Treasury. In a response to an audience question, he added:

“Meeting the £11.6bn remains our ambition as we undertake the spending review, and we’ll consider all of those spending plans, and it’s important that I and others in government continue to make the case, as [chancellor] Rachel Reeves makes those difficult choices.”

As part of its FOI requests, Carbon Brief specifically asked if the government intended to retain the nature and forests sub-goals within the broader £11.6bn target. The government response stated:

“Meeting the £11.6bn remains our ambition as we undertake the spending review, which will consider all spending plans inherited from the last government.”

Climate and nature campaigners tell Carbon Brief that they were pleased to see Lammy prioritising international climate action. “It is really encouraging to see the new UK government willing to play a leading role on climate and nature globally,” says Clement Metivier, acting head of international advocacy at WWF-UK.

With nations gathering at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, later this year to discuss a new global climate finance target, Harry Camilleri, a climate diplomacy and geopolitics researcher at E3G, tells Carbon Brief the UK would “lose credibility” if the £11.6bn goal slips:

“⁠Global climate agreements are built on trust. There is an expectation that the new goal will be significantly higher than the current $100bn target. Backtracking on existing commitments, which add up to a fraction of the costs faced by vulnerable countries, will not help.”

The UK’s nature and forest climate funding is also an important part of its contribution to biodiversity finance. This will be high on the agenda at the upcoming biodiversity summit, COP16, in Cali, Colombia, in October, as developed countries have pledged to raise at least $30bn in nature finance a year by 2030.

With this in mind, Alice Jay, international director at the Campaign for Nature, tells Carbon Brief:

“Now we need to see [Lammy] follow up on his words by re-committing to the existing international nature finance pledge to developing countries. We know the FCDO understands the urgency. But does the Treasury? This is the key issue that will decide whether this new UK nature leadership will be credible at the upcoming COP16.”

When asked about the government’s nature finance commitments, an FCDO spokesperson tells Carbon Brief:

 “As the foreign secretary set out in his speech at Kew Gardens last week, the climate and nature emergency is a central geopolitical challenge of our age. Tackling the scale of the threat is necessary to achieve clean and secure energy, lower bills and drive growth for the UK, and to preserve the natural world around us.

 “We have already begun to turn this ambition into action. The climate and nature crisis will be central to all that the Foreign Office does.”