UK’s climate fund to support developing nations reaches £4bn

The latest UK Climate Finance Results, published on Monday (July 9), reveal that the UK Government has achieved more than half of its target of spending at least £5.8bn on International Climate Finance (ICF) initiatives by 2021, after mobilising £3.3bn of public funding and £910m of private funding over the past six years.

The money has helped to provide cleaner energy to 17 million people in the least-developed countries (LDCs) and other developing nations, such as Nepal, South Africa and Sudan, while facilitating the installation of more than 590MW of renewable energy capacity, the results paper claims.

Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry said the progress of ICF initiatives “proves that well-directed finance can transform lives, cut carbon and create new global markets for green goods and services”.

“The UK has already slashed its own emissions by more than 40% since 1990 whilst growing our economy ahead of the G7 – creating jobs and prosperity through investment in new cleantech sectors – and we want to share this learning through our overseas development spending,” Perry said. 

The ICF programmes, carried out as part of a collaboration between BEIS, Defra and DFID, have additionally supported 47 million people in dealing with the adverse effects of climate change, with an aim of reaching 79 million by 2021.

The results note that the UK will only have to run seven more programmes related to climate change and three more to improve access to clean energy over the next three years to meet two of the ICF’s KPIs.

However, 18 more programmes aimed at cutting GHG emissions will need to be carried out and renewable arrays with a combined capacity of more than 5,200MW will need to be financed to meet the remaining targets.

These moves will require £7.1bn more public funding and £5.8bn of additional private investment to be poured into ICF initiatives before 2021, the results claim. The additional mobilised finance will be measured as public sources from outside the UK, including partner governments, donors, UN agencies and multilateral or regional development banks and investment agencies such as UK’s CDC Group.

The figures come just weeks after a network of some of the least developed countries in the world called on developed economies to collectively raise $50bn by 2020 for international climate loss and damage finance at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.

Sarah George