UK refutes claims it is scrapping $14.76 billion climate pledge

Jul 4 (Reuters) – The British government said on Tuesday that claims it was abandoning its International Climate Finance commitment were false, after it the Guardian reported that the country planned to abandon its main climate finance commitment of 11.6 billion pounds (14.76 billion dollars).

“The government remains committed to spending £11.6bn on international climate finance and we are delivering on that promise,” a British government spokesman said.

A document handed over to the British Foreign Office, which was seen by The Guardian, said: “Our commitment to double our international climate finance to £11.6bn was made in 2019, when we were still at 0.7 (% of GDP spent in international aid) and pre-COVID”.

Government officials estimated that it would need to spend 83% of the total aid budget in the international climate fund to reach the £11.6bn target by 2026. Government officials wrote that this would “reduce the space for other commitments, such as the humanitarian and that of women and girls”. the Guardian report added.

“We spent more than £1.4bn in international climate finance in fiscal year 2021/22, supporting developing countries to reduce poverty and respond to the causes and impacts of climate change. We will publish the latest annual figures in due course. time.”, the British government spokesman also said.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s climate policies have come under fire after Britain’s international environment minister Zac Goldsmith quit last week, saying that Sunak was “not interested” in environmental issues.

Goldsmith said Britain had “conspicuously withdrawn from the world stage and withdrawn our leadership on climate and nature”.

Britain’s climate advisers on the Climate Change Committee (CCC) also said last week that the nation has lost its position as a world leader in climate action and was not doing enough to meet its mid-century goal of net zero emissions.

The JCC found that Britain had lagged behind in areas including improving energy efficiency in buildings, deploying heat pumps, reducing emissions from industry and increasing the rate of tree planting, which should double by 2025.

Britain’s Met Office, its national weather service, said yesterday that last month was the hottest june on record in the country, warning that human-induced climate change was making such temperature records increasingly likely.

($1 = 0.7862 pounds)

Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bangalore; Edited by Josie Kao

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.