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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.

For allocable bilateral aid — that is, aid given from one country to another for specific projects — the share was one-third. Some of that aid is given to climate mitigation projects, which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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.

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.

Concerns about the displacement of traditional projects seem real, but so too are concerns that commitments to climate finance are often met through a relabeling exercise.