International Development Committee inquiry – the UK’s International Climate Finance

Written evidence submitted by The United Kingdom Committee for UNICEF (UNICEF UK) - January 2026

1. Who we are

1. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, is mandated by the UN General Assembly to uphold the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and promote the rights and wellbeing of every child. UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories, focusing special effort on reaching the most marginalised and excluded children.
2. The UK Committee for UNICEF (UNICEF UK) is a UK registered charity that raises funds for UNICEF’s emergency and development work around the world and advocates for lasting change for children worldwide.
3. UNICEF works with governments to strengthen services and infrastructure to prepare for and reduce the impact of climate-related disasters. We help to map vulnerability, design advanced early warning systems, and build climate-proof schools and hospitals. UNICEF also works with children and their communities to create a climate-safe world. We amplify children’s calls to action and advocate for children to be at the heart of climate change actions, decisions, and plans.
4. The content of this submission is based on UNICEF expertise and research, as well as insights from our partners. In 2021, UNICEF launched the Children’s Climate Risk Index which assesses children’s vulnerability to climate risk.[1] In 2023, UNICEF and a coalition of child rights organisations published the ‘Falling Short’ report examining the climate finance gap for children.[2] In 2025, UNICEF UK published ‘Short-Changed,’ an analysis of the UK’s child-focused International Climate Finance (ICF).[3]

2. Introduction

5. Children are disproportionately and uniquely impacted by the climate crisis. They are more at risk of negative impacts from extreme heat and from diseases that are exacerbated by climate change, such as malaria and dengue. They also represent one-third of the global population and more than half of the population in many of the most climate vulnerable countries. Climate action policies, strategies and finance that overlook children’s rights and wellbeing are a missed opportunity to set children up for success, and risk not effectively delivering their ambitions.
6. Article 4 of the UNCRC establishes States’ obligation to do all they can to promote and protect children’s rights, taking appropriate measures to implement these rights. As children are an integral part of the response to climate change, this perspective must be considered when analysing the threats arising from the climate crisis and opportunities for action to reduce risks.
7. UNICEF UK analysis found that the UK demonstrated climate leadership with 5-year ICF funding cycles. While child-focused ICF spending was comparatively small between 2011 and 2023, the few existing programmes showcased the potential of climate finance to build children’s long-term resilience to climate shocks while also generating immediate benefits for their wellbeing, like reducing malnutrition. However, we are concerned that ODA budget cuts have led to a decline in spending for children from both the development and climate perspectives.
8. We welcome this inquiry and make this submission with the aim of sharing evidence of the importance of the UK’s ICF for children around the world.

3. What impacts will the reduction of Official Development Assistance have on the UK’s ability to deliver its ICF commitments? What are the trade-offs associated with decisions to divert aid from ICF to other priorities, such as humanitarian crises?

9. 
   UK climate spending has increased substantially since the first ICF round began in 2011. Despite the pressures on the UK ODA budget, the commitment to spend £11.6 billion on the third round of ICF (2021-2026) appears to have protected ICF spending from the worst of the cuts. UK ODA excluding in-donor refugee costs decreased by 25% between 2019 and 2023, whereas ICF increased by 37%.
10. Consequently, ICF has become a much larger share of UK ODA spending in recent years. As a share of total ODA, it increased from 3.9% in 2011 to 11.0% in 2023. Assuming the spending trajectory outlined by the UK Government to meet the current ICF3 commitment,[4] ICF is estimated to make up approximately a quarter of the ODA budget for 2025/2026.
11. The challenge of meeting even the current commitment under the constraints of the existing ODA budget is apparent from the 2024 methodological changes to how ICF is measured, which will result in higher reported climate finance without any increase in spending.[5] Around 15% of the total ICF3 commitment will only be met because of these changes. This represents more than the UK spent on ICF in 2021-22 – the first two years of this spending round.
12. UNICEF UK analysis has shown that ODA budget cuts since 2020 have led to a decline in spending for children from both the development and climate perspectives.[6] Without a cohesive strategic approach to ensure children are prioritised, child-focused spending has been reduced both in overall ODA and in ICF.[7] We are very concerned that, under current trends, this decline will continue.
13. Children will bear the brunt of intensifying climate impacts over the course of their lifetime, with children aged 10 in 2020 set to experience five times as many extreme events as a person born in 1960.[8] This makes children and future generations the ultimate beneficiaries of all climate action and finance. However, funding must also address the specific needs and vulnerabilities children face today if they are to grow up and feel the benefits of these actions.
14. With ICF taking up a growing share of the UK ODA budget, and as climate shocks increase in frequency and intensity, it is more important than ever that the UK develops a strategic approach to children – with investments to climate-proof and safeguard access to the services they rely on like health, education, water and sanitation, and social protection.
15. To achieve this, the UK should build the FCDO’s child rights expertise and capacity so that ODA and ICF investments in child-critical social systems, as well as disaster risk reduction, meet children’s unique needs.
16. However, there is no good way forward under the current system. From 2024, the UK is counting a fixed 30% of humanitarian spending in the 10% most climate vulnerable countries as ICF. Whilst this might reduce trade-offs between climate and humanitarian priorities, it has limited potential to support effective climate action which requires sustained investment in resilience and adaptation.
17. Whether the government continues to protect ICF at the expense of its development and humanitarian priorities or reduces its ICF commitments going forward, everyone, but most of all children and future generations, will lose. Exploring new public-led sources of ICF that are additional to ODA flows is essential, recognising that it is no longer tenable to fully fund ICF solely from the ODA budget.

4. How transparent is the UK Government about its ICF commitments?

18. 
    Obtaining a clear picture of UK spending on ICF is difficult. Globally, OECD Rio-markers are often used to track climate finance, as they are easily accessible. However, this is not the approach that the UK uses to measure climate finance, and it yields significantly different numbers to those disclosed by the UK in official climate finance figures reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).[9]
19. While the UK has made important progress in climate finance transparency, it is still difficult to ascertain which projects are included because the relevant information is divided across different datasets, some of which are incomplete. The UK publishes a list of projects included in ICF figures in its ICF results page, but this does not provide any information about the projects.[10] This list can be combined with other datasets, but inconsistencies between datasets make this challenging to analyse.
20. Spending on climate could be more accurately captured by including a column in the UK’s Statistics on International Development publication data containing the percentage of each project included as ICF.
21. Improving departmental reporting to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) by all UK departments delivering ICF, especially by Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) is also necessary.

5. What lessons should the UK Government learn from the delivery of ICF between 2021-22 and 2025-26, including the effectiveness of multi-year commitments?

22. The UK’s five-year ICF commitments demonstrated strong climate leadership by enhancing predictability of funding. Reliable resources enable partners to implement multi-year strategies with confidence. This plays a key role in enabling the testing of and learning from innovative climate solutions.
23. Whilst the total amount of UK ICF with a child focus has been comparatively small, with just 20 programmes accounting for most of the child-focused spending, these interventions achieved positive outcomes for climate with development co-benefits. They illustrate how well-tailored interventions can directly contribute to children’s wellbeing as well as build their resilience to climate shocks.
24. For example, the ‘Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters’ (BRACED) programme specifically discussed the importance of considering the impact of climate shocks on children.[11] There were provisions to minimise disruption of children’s education in the event of a disaster, for instance. This ran between 2013 and 2021, with the aim to help poor and vulnerable communities cope with extreme climate and weather events. BRACED funded a range of interventions designed to generate learnings on how to incorporate disaster risk reduction into broader decision-making.
25. The completion review estimated that 14 million people were supported to better cope with weather events, and although this was not disaggregated to show the impact of children, they were a primary intended beneficiary. BRACED also generated several case studies on how to incorporate vulnerable groups into resilience planning. The benefits of this programme could go far beyond the 14 million people directly assisted if the learnings are applied to future programmes.
26. The ‘Productive Safety Net Programme’[12] accounted for around 14% of all child-focused ICF between 2011 and 2023 with around £143 million spent to reduce risk of famine in rural Ethiopia. The programme provided cash transfers and livelihood advice to support people in extreme poverty to build resilience to climate shocks. It achieved significant reductions in moderate acute malnutrition in children under 5, demonstrating the potential of such programmes to have long-term resilience impacts as well as immediate benefits for children.
27. Through funding for the Global Shield Financing Facility, the UK has also provided early support for UNICEF’s ‘Today and Tomorrow Initiative’ (TTI), the world’s first integrated climate and disaster risk finance mechanism specifically targeted and designed to be effective for children. With parametric insurance, this 3-year pilot quickly directed resources to urgent, unmet child and community needs, protecting children from the devastating impacts of cyclones. As of April 2025, TTI had triggered £8.5 million in insurance payouts, directly benefitting over 700,000 people – most of them children.
28. After Cyclones Hamoon and Remal hit Bangladesh in 2023 and 2024, payouts met critical needs for over 3,750 households with pregnant women, newborns and young children. These families experienced extreme poverty and often remained unreached by traditional disaster response funding.[13] TTI has also strengthened system-wide resilience in pilot countries; in Mozambique, for instance, it has led to the establishment of 83 new school disaster management committees and the development of school-based disaster preparedness plans benefiting over 40,000 students and teachers.[14]
29. This initiative is developing a model moving from traditional humanitarian response towards a proactive risk management approach to extreme weather events. As the pilot comes to an end in 2026, it is expected to scale to more countries and utilise risk financing tools to cover other hazards, such as earthquakes, floods and drought. UNICEF estimates that this has the potential to improve the efficiency of emergency response by up to ten times.

6. Is the UK’s use of loans, that represented more than two-thirds of the global ICF commitment in 2022, appropriate and, what is its impact on low-income and climate-vulnerable countries? How can the UK utilise innovative mechanisms, such as debt relief, as alternative routes to fulfilling its ICF commitments?

30. Traditionally the UK showed leadership in climate finance practices by providing most of its ICF as grants, alleviating pressure on developing countries to service debt. This began to change with an increasing share of ICF coming from British International Investment (BII), which primarily makes commercial investments in developing countries.
31. The 2024 methodological changes which included multilateral development bank contributions in ICF will accelerate this trend. Over 80% of the International Development Association’s climate finance was in the form of loans in 2023 according to OECD data. This alone means that roughly 17% of UK’s ICF would have been provided in the form of loans if the UK had used the new methodology in 2023.
32. This is important given that 93% of the world’s most climate vulnerable states face debt crisis and many of them spend five times more on debt servicing than on climate, even during climate crises.
33. The UK should champion and continue to participate in sustainable debt burden reduction, including automatic triggers for debt-service suspension during climate crises. However, the UK has limited scope to utilise debt relief as a significant funding instrument for ICF because the UK holds a small debt portfolio. The total amount of debt owed to the UK by lower-income countries is estimated at £1.33 billion – compared to around £1.04 trillion in external debt of low and middle-income countries.[15]
34. The UK does, however, have a leverage as 90% of low-income countries’ debt to private creditors is written under English law. The first four countries using the G20 common framework to restructure debt saw private creditors frustrating the process and holding out for better terms compared to other multilateral and bilateral creditors. The UK can address this with legislative reform that compels private creditors to engage in the common framework process on equal terms as other creditors. This reform is likely to accelerate debt restructuring and ensure developing countries are not held hostage by private creditors.

7. How should the UK’s ICF be spread between, mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage spend to respond to climate change most efficiently?

35. Adaptation is crucial for building children’s resilience and for safeguarding and improving their access to essential services like health, education, water and sanitation and social protection. The urgency and need for greater adaptation funding grows as climate-related shocks increase in frequency and intensity.
36. As well as commitments for aggregate spending on ICF, the UK has also committed to ‘balance’ mitigation and adaptation finance. Nearly all ICF with a child-focus has an adaptation component: only 5% was focused solely on mitigation, around £52 million between 2011 and 2023. This came from only a handful of mitigation-focused projects that contain social protection or WASH elements as part of wider programmes. An example is the ‘Green Growth Equity Fund’ in India that seeks to, among other things, increase the supply of clean water – crucial for combating waterborne diseases disproportionately likely to impact children.

37. On paper, the UK is committed to investing ICF in climate adaptation of services that children rely on, like health, as part of its ICF Strategy. Yet UNICEF UK’s analysis of bilateral ICF shows that very little is going toward those sectors. Climate spending on key sectors that children rely on was low; £100 million in health and £70 million in education, less than 1% of bilateral ICF for each sector between 2011 and 2023.
38. 
    While the share of ICF that has an adaptation component is 54%, the share of ICF solely focusing on adaptation is only 25%, considerably lower than the share solely focusing on mitigation. Progress towards the UK's key performance indicators on adaptation (‘Number of people supported to better adapt to the effects of climate change’ and ‘Number of people whose resilience has been improved’) has slowed in recent years, but that this is not the case for mitigation.[16]
39. Going forward, the UK should continue to strive to balance mitigation and adaptation, including by strengthening cross-cutting funding with a principal focus on adaptation.
40. The UK is already committed to investing ICF in services that children rely on, like health and education. This commitment is crucial to leveraging ICF to prevent negative outcomes for children and set them up for success. To make ICF work for children, the UK should prioritise adaptation funding to ensure critical systems like health, education and water and sanitation can withstand climate shocks.
41. Investing in initiatives with co-benefits for climate and development, such as resilient energy for healthcare, education and water systems in developing countries, can deliver significant net benefits. Analysing case studies of Pakistan and Tanzania, Economist Impact found that a £1 investment in energy resilience could return up to £3 through positive impacts on adult, infant and maternal mortality, immunisation rates, educational attainment, students’ earnings, and water provision for households and agriculture. These are conservative estimates, and the true economic benefit of energy resilience investments is likely to be notably higher.[17]

8. Recommendations

42. Continue to balance mitigation and adaptation, seeking to dedicate 50% of UK ICF to adaptation.
43. Prioritise grant-based funding for adaptation – which delivers broad public benefits and often presents high barriers to private sector investment.
44. Invest in initiatives with co-benefits for climate and development, such as resilient energy for healthcare, education and water systems.
45. Make UK ICF work for children, including through a commitment to spend at least 25% of ODA on children – especially on programmes that support health, nutrition and education systems to withstand the changing climate.
46. Build the FCDO’s child rights expertise and capacity so that ODA and ICF investments in child-critical social systems and disaster risk reduction meet children’s unique needs.
47. Identify new public-led sources of ICF that are additional to ODA flows, recognising that it is no longer tenable to fully fund ICF solely from the ODA budget.
48. Ensure that the methodology for capturing UK ICF is robust, transparent and accurately represents spending on climate migration, adaptation and loss and damage.

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