UK accused of ‘cutting corners’ on climate finance as El Nino looms

The UK government is “cutting corners” on its commitments to provide climate aid, MPs have warned in a new report, just as a record-breaking ‘super’ El Niño weather event begins to intensify extreme weather and humanitarian crises around the world.

The International Development Committee said that cuts to the UK’s aid budget - which will result in the UK’s bilateral aid relationship essentially ending with a large group of countries - have undermined its ability to provide meaningful support to some of the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries .

Its report on “International Climate Finance” - a stream of foreign aid that rich countries are obligated to provide under the terms of the 2015 Paris Agreement - finds that successive reductions in the aid budget have damaged the UK’s ability to meet its climate commitments “in a meaningful, transparent and credible way”.

MPs also criticised changes to the way climate finance is accounted for, which allow existing humanitarian aid to be counted towards the UK’s climate spending commitments.

They said the government had prioritised maintaining headline spending figures “as opposed to striving to deliver genuine climate and nature outcomes”.

Sarah Champion , chair of the committee, said climate change was already “swiftly reversing development progress in vulnerable countries”, and warned that El Niño could worsen water insecurity and push more people into acute food shortages.

“Rather than striving to deliver genuine climate and nature outcomes, the government has been cutting corners to maintain headline climate spending commitments,” she said.

Catherine Pettengell, executive director of the Climate Action Network UK, which represents 45 civil society organisations working on climate, added: “Current ICF commitments fall far short of the UK’s fair share of the finance needed by low- and middle-income countries to tackle the climate crisis not of their making.

“Today’s IDC report must serve as a wake-up call to this new government on the extent to which UK credibility and commitments have been eroded and undermined by cuts and creative accounting.”

The government has committed to spending around £6bn of foreign aid on climate finance over the three financial years from 2026-27 to 2028-29.