UK Climate Aid Squanders Billions On Overseas ‘Greenwashing’ Schemes

Climate aid is “spaffing taxpayers’ money up the wall”, the shadow energy secretary has said. Claire Coutinho said that an £11.6bn budget meant to help fight climate change had become “a bureaucrat’s dream and the taxpayers’ nightmare”. [emphasis, links added]

A Telegraph investigation revealed that the International Climate Finance initiative (ICF) has funded schemes, including a £52m road to nowhere through the middle of the Amazon rainforest and a plan to stop ocean plastic pollution from landlocked African countries.

Ms Coutinho said: “The issue that I have is with people spaffing taxpayers’ money up the wall.

“What you’ve seen from some of these programs, these massive billions of pounds of climate-aid programs, is that they are just not good value for money.

“They don’t do what they say on the tin. We know that some of the money, for example, is going to carve up the Amazon and things like that.

“So in all of these areas, I think the thing that the public really keenly feels is that they become a bureaucrat’s dream and the taxpayers’ nightmare, because what you’re doing is spending hundreds of millions of pounds with very little oversight and actually for no good outcome.”

A seven-month Telegraph investigation has revealed that many of the programmes funded by the ICF budget have been mired in allegations of fraud and corruption, whilst others seemingly have little to do with the environment.

The aim of the cash is to allow developing countries to access clean energy, avoid deforestation, and build green infrastructure, and to help them adapt and respond to the impacts of climate change.

But after a Freedom of Information battle, The Telegraph has exposed how the money is going to schemes, including helping oil companies in Nigeria and China, and a project to help subsistence farmers by “rewilding” wetlands, but that led to the destruction of crops and homes.

Taxpayers are even spending £200m on a scheme to help some of the world’s biggest companies achieve net zero, despite civil servants admitting it could be seen as “greenwashing”.

The pledge to spend £11.6bn in ICF between 2021 and the end of this financial year was first made by the Tories in 2019.

Ms Coutinho, who was secretary of state for energy security and net zero between the summer of 2023 and the 2024 election, has now revealed that she was planning to scrap it.

“It’s one of the things that I was looking at in office, and we thought we were going to bring it down, because it didn’t look like the money was being spent well,” she told GB News. “The problem that I had with it is that you don’t get a huge amount of transparency, and it is an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money.”

Her concerns had been echoed by the aid watchdog, which found that there was a lack of transparency over the budget and that it would be difficult to meet the target on time.

But, in spite of this, Labour vowed to spend the rest of the cash when they were elected in 2024.

Ed Miliband, who replaced Ms Coutinho as energy secretary when Labour came into power, said the promise would send “a powerful signal to the world that we are serious about the leadership role the UK can play in driving global climate action”.

The idea of the UK being a world leader in climate change is one that Sir Keir Starmer will push when he meets his counterparts at COP30 in Brazil later this week.

Ms Coutinho said that the Government’s focus should instead be on bringing down the aid budget.

She said that the “heart of the problem with these climate-aid projects is that they are completely unaccountable and completely untransparent. And that’s when you know that people are going to spend the money badly”.

Governments hand over cash to aid organizations, “and no one can really track where the money is going and how well it’s being spent, and that just becomes a way of people wasting the taxpayer money that we could spend on lots of other projects,” she added.

Read rest at The Telegraph