Where climate and biodiversity funding really goes
A new global study has revealed where the world’s environmental aid is flowing and who is being left behind in the distribution of these funds.
Over the past decade, more than 180,000 projects were launched across the developing world to help countries adapt to climate change and protect biodiversity. But a closer look at the numbers shows that who gets the money and how much depends on geography, size, and even the type of ecosystem.
The analysis, covering 124 countries across the Global South between 2013 and 2022, found that only about one-third of all projects actually targeted both climate adaptation and biodiversity protection together, even though the two goals are deeply interconnected.
The study, published in World Development, drew on data from 230 government and non-governmental funders, both bilateral and multilateral, tracking the flow of climate and nature aid.
Of the 182,834 projects reviewed, about 55,900 aimed to address both climate adaptation and biodiversity. Yet only 6,200 treated both issues as core priorities; the rest treated one as a co-benefit of the other.
“Thirty percent of the 182,834 projects, climate and/or biodiversity projects explicitly sought to contribute to both climate adaptation and biodiversity objectives. Of these 55,907 projects, approximately 6,208 had both climate adaptation and biodiversity as their principal objective. Other projects had either climate adaptation or biodiversity as the principal objective and had the other as a significant objective,” the study found.
That means most projects still treat climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation as separate missions, despite increasing evidence that their success depends on one another.
The study said the link is clearest in two sectors, agriculture and environmental protection, which together accounted for roughly half of all dual-purpose projects. These areas, the authors suggested, offered the greatest potential for synergy, such as climate-smart agriculture, mangrove restoration, or forest-based carbon projects that support both ecosystems and livelihoods.
Most importantly, the study found that Asia dominated the climate funding between 2013 to 2022, with the top five recipients of climate adaptation finance being Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
