The UK is no longer the top contributor to the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF), after the government announced that it only intends to honour half of its most recent pledge.
Amid wider cuts to its climate aid for developing countries, the UK informed the GCF in May that it will reduce its commitment for the 2024-27 period to £815m ($1.1bn).
In doing so, the Labour government is drastically cutting a Conservative pledge of £1.62bn ($2.16bn), hailed by former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s government as “the biggest single funding commitment the UK has made to help the world tackle climate change”.
This “record” pledge also meant the UK became the top GCF funder, after the Trump administration withdrew $4bn in pledged US funds in 2025.
Now, the UK follows the US in becoming the second major donor to cancel substantial funding, leaving aid experts concerned that other developed countries will follow suit.
As the chart below shows, the UK’s total past and promised contributions to the GCF have now dropped below those of Germany, France and Japan.
The GCF is the largest dedicated UN climate fund and is seen as a vital way of raising grant-based climate finance for developing countries. It oversees more than $20bn worth of funding across 354 projects and programmes.
Developed countries, such as the UK, are obliged under the Paris Agreement to provide climate finance. One of the main ways to do this is through specialised climate funds, such as the GCF.
However, despite countries committing to increase their climate finance over time, progress in scaling up GCF contributions between funding rounds has been gradual.
With its now-revoked £1.62bn pledge in 2023, the UK was among the donors that had increased its GCF pledging compared with the previous 2019 funding round.
The latest reduction means the UK will now provide around 45% less funding than it did during the 2019 round. This is the biggest reduction between rounds by any major donor, apart from the US.
In an email to the GCF board, reported by the Financial Times, the fund’s executive director Mafalda Duarte said the UK’s actions were “expected to have a material impact on the delivery” of the fund’s projects.
According to the newspaper, Duarte noted that the move came as the UK cuts its overall aid budget in order to “invest more in addressing growing security threats”.
In March, the UK government announced plans to spend “around £6bn” of its aid budget on climate projects in developing countries over the next three years.
Carbon Brief analysis suggests that this spending amounts to roughly halving the UK’s annual climate finance, when accounting changes and inflation are factored in.
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