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📝 New article on Our World in Data: How much development aid is spent on climate change? For a long time, we didn’t have good data to answer this basic question.

But using tags from the RioMarkers database, we’ve constructed a dataset on how much aid is spent on climate change, and what that funding is used for. The headline result is that, in 2024, around one-fifth of development aid was climate-related.

Some is given to adaptation: ways of dealing with the impacts of climate change. And just as much is given to projects that do both. Whether climate-related aid is in conflict or crowds out other aid efforts is hard to untangle.

When we look at individual examples, many look like traditional aid projects, with a subtle link to climate efforts. Take the building of a hospital in Tanzania; its main objective is to provide healthcare and save lives.

But it’s also tagged as a climate-related project because it was built with energy efficiency in mind. Would that hospital have been built in a world without climate change? Probably. Other cases are less clear.