Mapped: How UK foreign aid is spent on climate change

10 October 2017. Using freedom-of-information (FOI) requests submitted to the UK government, Carbon Brief listed that the UK government has committed “climate-specific” aid to 284 projects around the world.

Carbon Brief has mapped the countries where a significant proportion of this climate finance is aimed, as well as produce a breakdown of regional spending by continent. Using the newly released information, we have also created a spreadsheet that includes details such as year-to-year funding, location, duration and description of each project.

The analysis shows that:

• Ethiopia has received the most single-country funding since 2011 – £139.7m.
• Africa has received the most regional funding since 2011 – £826.4m.
• Funding rose year-on-year in the run-up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, but has slightly fallen since.
• Since 2011, £4.968bn of UK foreign aid has been spent on 284 climate change projects.
• The UK has given £1.228bn to the multilateral Climate Investment Funds in total since 2011, far more than any single project.

Each year, the UK government publishes a document called “Climate Finance Results”. The latest (pdf) was published in July and covers the year up to March 2017. In the 2016 results document, published by DFID, the UK government said that “across the three departments, there are almost 200 projects currently in implementation which are spending climate finance”.

DFID released the full list of the projects, including their project codes and a breakdown of annual spending on each project since 2011 up to this year. These codes were then used by Carbon Brief to access all the details of each project on DFID’s Development Tracker website.