Responding to the Trump administration’s recalibration of U.S. foreign policy, the United Kingdom and many European Union countries are rushing to redirect billions of euros into military spending after previously earmarking them to help the Global South build climate resilience.
The move will have serious socio-economic and strategic consequences at home and abroad, policy experts warn.
Aid agencies are decrying the shuffling of funds as a moral failure, while echoing concerns that prioritizing defence over climate-focused development is a dangerous strategic mistake.
The UK will make room for more military spending by cutting an annual equivalent of US$7.6 billion in development aid, starting in 2027, while the Netherlands plans to similarly redirect the equivalent of US$2.5 billion and Germany nearly US$1 billion, reports Bloomberg. Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are known to have similar reallocations in the works.
Pulling essential funding out of climate-vulnerable countries will come back to haunt donor nations, the news outlet warns, with the clawback in climate protections likely to result in higher prices on imported commodities like coffee, cocoa, and bananas.
The UK is particularly exposed, importing 20% of its food from countries that become more vulnerable every year to climate impacts like heat, drought, and increasingly severe cyclones.
“We are mutually dependent on these countries,” Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, told Bloomberg.
Fears are growing that the gutting of development budgets will also kneecap the hard-won COP29 agreement to provide US$300 million in annual climate finance. That’s after the U.S. announced it was abandoning the hard-won loss and damage fund, established after the 2023 UN climate summit, COP28, in Dubai.
“We can’t believe—given the scale of the cut—that the increase in climate finance we were hoping to see following Baku [at COP29]… will be taken forward,” Nick Mabey, chief executive of the climate think tank E3G, told Politico.
Climate and Security Intertwined
Europe’s whiplash shift to prioritizing military spending overdevelopment comes even as many countries were beginning to reckon with the complex and deepening intersections between climate and security.
“Countries around the world have begun incorporating climate security in their various national security strategies or approaches,” E3G wrote in a late November blog post.
The climate think tank mentioned the then “recently released” U.S. Framework for Climate Resilience and Security, now deleted from the White House website, and Germany’s 2023 National Security Strategy, as exemplars, as well as UK Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband’s move to make climate and energy security “central to his messaging at COP29.”
Some of the world’s most vulnerable countries—including Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Mali, South Sudan, and Ukraine—affirmed their interest in climate security at Baku, E3G added.
Fast forward three months and the EU has delayed release of a promised roadmap to wean the EU off Russian oil, gas, and nuclear technology.
“We are still moving forward with the roadmap, it is being prepared, but the timing has changed in light of the latest geopolitical developments,” a senior EU official told Politico, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The EU is currently holding talks with the Trump administration that are likely to include commitments to increase imports of American gas, while Washington’s bilateral talks with Russia in recent weeks have sparked uncertainty over future economic relations between the Kremlin and the West,” Politico writes.
The international aid community has been uniformly appalled by the repurposing of climate funds to pay for national and international security.
A ‘Dangerous and False Dichotomy’
A “dangerous and false dichotomy” is how Evelien van Roemburg, director of Oxfam International’s EU Office, described the move in a letter last week to the European Council, just prior to its meeting to discuss EU defence and Ukraine.
“An unacceptable balancing of the books on the backs of the world’s most marginalized people,” Catherine Pettengell, executive director of Climate Action Network UK, told Politico.
Declaring itself “horrified” by the cuts to development finance, Christian Aid recommended a different path for at least the Starmer government: “We urge the UK government to show global leadership by taxing wealthy polluters and compelling private creditors to cancel debts for countries in crisis.”
But the stock market is betting on bombs, not batteries.
“The S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost about 40% of its value since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The S&P Global 1200 Aerospace & Defense Index climbed 64% in the same period,” reports Bloomberg.
