The UK will find it challenging to meet its £11.6bn ($14.6bn) climate finance commitment, watchdog the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) said this week in a review.
The UK government pledged in 2019 to deliver £11.6bn in climate finance — to help developing countries adapt and respond to climate change — between 2021-22 and 2025-26. Of that, 55pc is now planned to be spent in the final two years of the commitment, ICAI found, and "up to £3.8bn" is due in the final year. It noted that a general election and "at least one spending review" are scheduled before that.
The government has "moved the goalposts", by changing the way it calculates how the target is met, as well as reviewing existing spending to include any eligible climate finance, ICAI said. This amounted to an additional £1.72bn, "of which none was additional to recipient countries", it added. Most funding was "translated into loans rather than grants", the report found. Loans typically place poorer countries at a further disadvantage.
The watchdog found "insufficient transparency about all the accounting changes as well as the review of existing aid spend… making it difficult to replicate the government's calculations and hold the UK to account for its climate finance commitments".
ICAI recommended the government improve transparency through reporting on progress, and set out detailed plans for how it will reach the £11.6bn target. It expects a government response to its review in April.
The UK government has had to reaffirm its commitment to the £11.6bn pledge more than once. Zac Goldsmith, former climate minister at the foreign ministry, in a resignation letter last year accused the government of effectively abandoning the promise.
Climate finance will be front and centre at the UN Cop 29 climate summit, to be held in November in Baku, Azerbaijan. Countries must also decide on a new finance goal — the next stage of the $100bn/yr that developed countries agreed to deliver to developing countries over 2020-25.
