What more UK aid cuts could mean for climate change, health, and conflict

Fears are growing among development experts about looming cuts to key U.K. aid programs amid reports that the climate change, conflict prevention, and global health budgets are all facing the knife. On Wednesday, sources at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office told The Telegraph that Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is planning “radical” changes to the long-awaited international development strategy that could deprioritize these areas — in which the United Kingdom has long been considered a leader — in favor of projects focused on women and girls, a key area of interest for her. Others in the sector believe the crisis in Ukraine will be cited to justify a shake-up. Asked by Devex, an FCDO spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied the reports but said simply that the forthcoming development strategy “will set out how we deliver our climate change and health commitments, as well as restoring funding for women and girls and humanitarian work this year.” The size of the cuts being considered to the conflict prevention, climate change, and global health programs is not known, but it would be the third round of cuts these areas have suffered in recent times after the U.K's overall aid budget shrank two years in a row. More than 200 British NGOs signed a letter Wednesday expressing concern over the cuts, and there are wider efforts underway to convince Truss to change course. But what are the implications if reductions in these areas go ahead? Conflict prevention “If they are about to cut conflict prevention, it’s the worst possible time to do it,” said Nic Hailey, executive director at International Alert, a peace-building NGO. “Clearly they need to mobilize a lot of money for Ukraine, but to argue that you do that at the cost of all the other things that are going on in the world is pretty absurd,” he added. Lewis Brooks, U.K. policy and advocacy coordinator at Saferworld, another peace-building NGO, said that if cuts to conflict prevention were to go ahead, it would be “an almost immediate U-turn from the government.” He referenced a Feb. 9 letter from FCDO Minister Vicky Ford to members of Parliament about the newly created Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation, which was much anticipated by conflict experts. It’s unclear whether or how the office would be affected. Hailey, who is previously a senior official at FCDO, expressed concerns about the heightened risk of hunger and conflict caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, which is affecting food and fuel prices across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. “We’re already starting to see the impact … basically every country we’re working in our teams are telling us that these economic impacts in particular are leading to fragility,” Hailey said, citing Sudan and Lebanon. He also voiced fears for the stability of autocratic states in Central Asia — Kazakhstan saw protesters suppressed by Russian troops in January — where he said millions of migrant workers are returning home from Russia amid the country’s economic collapse. “What it feels like is ministers are not taking the longer-term view the Integrated Review said they should take,” Hailey said in reference to the U.K.’s landmark foreign policy document published in 2021. Hailey added that it would be “really, really sad for the U.K. to cut aid in an area in which the U.K. is really good at,” such as conflict. He cited the U.K.’s networks; cross-government Conflict, Stability and Security Fund; permanent membership to the U.N. Security Council; and military. “To cut that off would be a great tragedy,” Hailey said. “What [the U.K. does] matters. The stepping back of the U.K. from global health would send a very strong message to our allies and people we’ve worked with for decades.” --— Aaron Oxley, executive director, Results UK Climate change The U.K. is the president of the Conference of Parties summit on climate change, having hosted COP 26 in Glasgow last November, and is charged with leading climate diplomacy and encouraging countries around the world to improve their climate pledges. Of the potential cuts, Clare Shakya, director of climate change research group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said: “If this is true, we are seeing a criminally scary moment coming.” “There is not enough attention being paid to the biggest challenge the world has ever faced,” she said, citing the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Women and girls are expected to be hit particularly hard by the impacts of climate change. “It’s really worrying to see a really siloed approach emerging in the FCDO both with respect to the structure of the organization and the development spend, which flies in face of the interconnected challenges of development,” said Alex Scott, program lead for climate diplomacy and geopolitics at the E3G think tank. It is unclear how a cut to the climate change portion of the aid budget would affect the £11.6 billion ($15.3 billion) the U.K. has earmarked for international climate finance between 2021 and 2026. A particular sticking point in climate diplomacy has been the failure on the part of higher-income countries to deliver a promised $100 billion of annual climate finance to vulnerable nations to fund the response to a warming world. Shakya feared that a U.K. cut could “potentially lead to lots of other countries doing the same thing” even as experts and lower-income countries call for increased climate adaptation funding. The U.K. “barely scraped through” a successful outcome at COP 26, Scott said. “This [prospective] cut damages the chances of a successful COP 27 presidency year.” With or without a cut, FCDO is “increasing risk of greenwashing so even if they can claim they provided it, it's poor quality and doesn't tackle underlying vulnerability or shift development pathways,” said Shakya. She said this was because it could mean “business as usual development programmes” are counted as climate investments because “they deal with things influenced by weather [such as water and agricultural sectors] even though they don't support actors to consider how to adapt to current weather variability let alone long term climate change.” Global health “What does it say about how the U.K. values health and global health, particularly coming out the back of COVID-19 when we’ve seen that health impacts in other parts of the world have massive impacts on the U.K.,” said Clare Wenham, associate professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics. “It’s really shortsighted at a time when we’ve learned how important and interconnected health issues are, that it’s not the right time to backtrack and say it's not important.” “What [the U.K. does] matters. The stepping back of the U.K. from global health would send a very strong message to our allies and people we’ve worked with for decades on fighting global health threats,” said Aaron Oxley, executive director at Results UK, a health campaign group. “The U.K. has been a historic leader in global health, to say at this moment in time not a priority — it’s difficult to contemplate the strategic thinking that would lead you to that decision,” Oxley said. He cited the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — co-founded by the U.K. and seeking replenishment this year — and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to which the U.K. has been a key donor, saying each organization “prevents a death every two minutes.” Cutting programs as simple as providing antiretroviral drugs and malaria bed nets “means people’s lives around the world are going to be significantly affected,” said Wenham.