Rich-world climate aid pledges shrink by roughly 70% ahead of COP31

Promised annual public climate finance for poorer countries has dropped from about $40bn to about $11.7bn, and only five donors have made new multi-year pledges.

A Carbon Brief analysis finds that public climate-finance pledges from developed countries to developing ones have fallen by more than 70% in 2026. Previously pledged annual public finance was about $40bn. Current pledges average about $11.7bn a year for the rest of the 2020s, a fall of about 71%. The analysis draws on the NRDC and E3G commitments tracker, with extra research, and covers the 23 developed countries obliged to give climate finance plus the EU.

Only five nations have announced new multi-year pledges: the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium. The UK is the only major donor among them. Its pledge averages $5.7bn a year, about half of all annual pledged funds from 2026, and it looks more ambitious only because it now counts $8.9bn of additional public finance from outside the aid budget. Compared like-for-like on aid, the new pledge is a drop. The US, which had committed to $11.4bn a year by 2024 under Biden, has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement again and will give no official climate finance in coming years. Germany, France and Japan have not set out new pledges, and Australia, which co-hosts COP31 with Turkey, has not announced one.

This matters for abundance because public money is what pays for clean energy and adaptation where private capital is slow to go. Two years ago, developed countries agreed to lead on lifting annual climate finance from $100bn to $300bn by 2035. Public spending has been roughly a third of climate finance in recent years, so a shrinking public share makes that goal harder to reach and leaves poorer countries paying more for the transition themselves.

Watch the COP31 talks, where developing countries are pushing a climate-finance work programme. Caveats: official 2025 data is not yet available, and the EU and its member states gave a record €32.3bn in 2025. Japan and Norway are excluded because they set no specific public-finance pledges. Including Germany's and France's forest-facility pledges would change the fall from 71% to 70%.

Source: Carbon Brief