Charles Rotter
On October 26, Our World in Data published a piece by Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada asking how much development aid is spent on climate change. Ritchie opens by saying she cares a lot about climate and a lot about bed nets, and that the two could collide.
With a fixed aid budget, every dollar spent on climate programs is one less dollar for everything else. And with large cuts to foreign aid in the last few years, that budget is shrinking.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-development-aid-is-spent-on-climate-change
The data come from the OECD’s RioMarkers database, which tags bilateral aid projects by whether they target climate mitigation or adaptation. The answer:
Around one-third of this funding — $50 billion — was committed to climate-related projects in 2024.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-development-aid-is-spent-on-climate-change
That is a third of project-specific bilateral aid, almost a quarter of all bilateral aid, and by their estimate about a fifth of all development aid. In 2010 the project share was around 18%. By 2024 it was 34%.
Bjorn Lomborg put the same number on X the same day:
Across the rich world, nearly a quarter of all development aid now goes to climate projects.
The core problem is opportunity cost. Every dollar subsidizing solar panels or carbon accounting is a dollar not spent on schools, maternal health or clean water.
https://x.com/BjornLomborg/status/2114708178973626684
That second paragraph is lifted from a Financial Post op-ed he wrote with Indermit Gill, the former chief economist of the World Bank, which puts the rich-world figure at US$49 billion.
Here is where it gets interesting. Ritchie and Arriagada went looking at what the label covers.
As you can see in the chart, more than half of climate-related funding goes to projects where it’s only a secondary objective. All funding for these projects is counted in its full value, not just the share we might attribute to climate.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-development-aid-is-spent-on-climate-change
Count only the projects where climate is the main objective and the share falls from 34% to 13%. Then they open up individual projects. Japan’s $310 million water supply project in drought-prone Samawah, Iraq, is tagged as adaptation with climate as the main objective. France’s $122 million Kakono hydro plant in Tanzania, climate as a primary objective. And this one:
Finally, South Korea provided $163 million for a hospital and training center in Tanzania. Building a hospital and healthcare facilities is a fairly standard development aid project. But because it’s built with energy efficiency and low-carbon design in mind, it’s counted as mitigation as a secondary objective. It doesn’t exist to tackle climate change, but all of this $163 million counts as climate-related aid.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-development-aid-is-spent-on-climate-change
All $163 million of a hospital.
Water for a desert town and power for Tanzania were aid projects long before anyone attached a climate tag. Ritchie says as much: rich countries were funding energy infrastructure in poor ones “long before aid statistics had a climate tag attached.”
So which is it, money diverted or money relabelled? The authors say probably both, and that the data can’t tell them how much of each. The donors have a reason to prefer the second. Climate finance pledges are supposed to be new money. A hospital that counts toward the pledge and the aid budget at the same time lets a government tick both boxes with one cheque.
The OWID data hold a hint. In constant 2024 dollars, bilateral project aid from DAC members that carried no climate tag at all was $97.6 billion in 2010 and $95.8 billion in 2024. Total project aid grew. Everything that grew wore the climate label.
The donors aren’t uniform either.
South Korea tags more than 60% of its bilateral aid as climate-related, Japan between about 50% and 80%, France above 40%. The United States and Canada sit below a fifth. Ritchie asks whether that is a real difference in what they fund or just a difference in how keen they are to tick the box. Given the Tanzanian hospital, I’d bet on the box.
And the money isn’t going mostly to the poorest. OWID notes that climate-related projects dominate aid spending in Brazil and India, both middle-income countries.
Meanwhile, what do the recipients want? Gill and Lomborg:
Tellingly, Africans ranked climate change 31st among 34 priorities in a recent Afrobarometer survey.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-need-focus-on-best-ways-help-poor
They also cite Copenhagen Consensus estimates that US$2.50 of micronutrient supplements for an expectant mother returns nearly US$100 in long-term benefits, and that tuberculosis and malaria treatment returns more than $45 per dollar. Their suggestion comes from Norway, where an expert group has recommended separating climate finance from the development budget.
Ritchie ends by inviting someone to go through historical aid projects and find out how much of the climate column is new. That would be worth reading.
How many other hospitals are in the $50 billion?
And how much of the pledged climate finance turns out to be the old aid budget with a green sticker on it?
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Charts and quotes from Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0.
