The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the United Nations climate damage fund that was established in 2023 at COP28 to help developing countries most vulnerable to climate change when natural disasters strike. Establishment of the fund was a victory for climate change activists from developing nations, with nearly 200 countries signing onto the agreement. At the 2023 climate conference, the U.S. pledged $17.5 million to the fund, while the EU contributed $245 million, including $100 million from Germany. “Both the United States Board Member and United States Alternate Board Member will be stepping down, not to be replaced by a U.S. representative,” Rebecca Lawlor, the U.S. representative on the fund’s board, said in a March 4 letter. For decades, island nations have pushed for developed, polluting countries to put money toward helping developing countries rebuild after climate disasters. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to remove the U.S. from international agreements. One of his first orders after taking office was to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate accords. He had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris agreement during his first term — a decision that was reversed under the Biden administration. The decision to withdraw from the U.N. fund was quickly condemned, with Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators, writing on X: “At a time when the world needs a concerted effort to fight the effects of climate change, the spirit of multilateralism should remain our guiding light.”

BRUSSELS — The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) is facing a crisis after the United States halted dozens of aid grants despite an emergency waiver meant to keep food assistance flowing. The freeze threatens food deliveries to millions in Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Mali, among other crisis zones. The stoppage follows U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping 90-day pause on foreign aid, announced just hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio later issued a waiver for life-saving humanitarian aid — including food, medical supplies and shelter — WFP officials say that, in practice, funding has stalled and there is little clarity on when or if it will resume. On Jan. 29, WFP received a list of dozens of U.S.-funded projects now subject to “stop work” orders, according to internal emails seen by Reuters. Many of these projects were administered under Food for Peace Title II, a U.S. program that has historically provided large-scale food assistance, valued at around $2 billion annually. “The scale of this disruption underscores the far-reaching consequences of the funding pause on global food assistance efforts,” a senior WFP official wrote in one of the emails seen by Reuters. The agency estimates that more than 507,000 metric tons of food — worth more than $340 million — are stranded, whether en route by sea, sitting in warehouses in 23 countries or stalled in domestic U.S. supply chains. The situation has been compounded by a drastic restructuring at USAID, the main U.S. agency funding global food relief. Thousands of staff are reportedly being cut under a plan led by Elon Musk, tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That leadership vacuum has made it even harder for the Rome-based WFP and other aid groups to get answers about the status of their funding. A WFP spokesperson told POLITICO that the agency is working to navigate the crisis. “WFP greatly appreciates the support it receives from all of its donors. Our colleagues are in constant contact with key stakeholders in the U.S. government to ensure we understand any new developments or priorities that relate to our work,” the spokesperson said. As WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain scrambles to get answers in Washington, European donors are bracing for impact. The European Union, one of the world’s largest aid donors, has not yet indicated whether it will increase funding to offset the shortfall, but aid officials fear the coming months could test its ability — and willingness — to fill the gap. SHIFTING PRIORITIES The disruption to WFP’s operations may not be just a temporary setback — it could be a sign of a fundamental shift in how the U.S. approaches global food aid. The Trump administration’s 90-day foreign aid review isn’t just a bureaucratic pause — it’s part of a broader rethink of Washington’s role in international assistance. According to Devex, much of this shift is being shaped by Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint championed by the Heritage Foundation that has heavily influenced the administration’s approach to aid. The agenda explicitly calls for removing references to “transforming food systems” from U.S. government policies, pushing instead for a focus on commodity-based food assistance with minimal government oversight. That could mean a return to a more transactional, America-first approach to food aid, where funding is prioritized for U.S. agricultural exports rather than long-term food security programs. It also signals potential cuts to sustainability and climate-smart agriculture initiatives, which have been key pillars of U.S. international food assistance in recent years. Devex also reported that the Trump administration’s skepticism toward climate policies is already having an impact on food aid priorities. At the COP28 climate summit in 2023, USAID pledged $100 million to support climate-resilient agriculture through CGIAR, an initiative aimed at boosting food security in vulnerable regions. That funding now hangs in the balance, with aid experts warning that future U.S. food security programs may be evaluated based on political optics rather than effectiveness. Trump has tasked Musk with overhauling USAID, reportedly planning to shrink its workforce from thousands to just a few hundred employees. While Trump allies argue this will streamline government spending, aid officials warn it could cripple the agency’s ability to manage food assistance programs, exacerbating disruptions like the one WFP now faces.

LONDON — With the second age of Donald Trump looming, and European allies such as France and Germany hobbled by political instability, the United Kingdom has been on the hunt for new friends on the world stage. And now it seems Prime Minister Keir Starmer has found a somewhat unlikely new BFF: Brazil. It is a relationship founded on a shared commitment to climate goals — with the wheels of diplomacy oiled by some hearty football banter. Since Starmer became prime minister in July, no fewer than 12 British ministers have made the 5,500-mile trip from London to Brazil. That’s partly because the South American nation hosted this year’s G20 summit of world leaders. But it also reflects a growing closeness between the two governments on the pressing need to tackle the global climate crisis. Just since November, London and Brasília have joined forces to launch a multistate clean energy pact, coordinated announcements of major new climate targets, and talked up cooperation ahead of the next big United Nation climate summit, to be held in the Brazilian port city of Belém in 2025. Amid global uncertainty, these are the sorts of “coalitions of the willing” on climate diplomacy that green-conscious leaders will need to forge, said Robin Niblett, a distinguished fellow and former chief executive at the Chatham House think tank. But the new best buddies will also have to navigate disagreements over one of the biggest foreign policy issues of all — Russia and Ukraine. FOOTBALL … AND DIPLOMACY In a bid to lock in the alliance, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — expected back at work after Christmas following a health scare — has invited Starmer for yet another visit next year. It will be a chance to “map the opportunities and economic areas where the countries can work together,” Brazil said. If Starmer and Lula can make it work, they will owe a debt of thanks to a shared love of football — and especially Starmer’s beloved Arsenal, where four Brazilians ply their trade.  A football-centric bromance was on show at the G20, according to one Lula ally. “It helps significantly that they are both football enthusiasts,” Brazil’s ambassador in London, Antonio Patriota, told POLITICO. “The initial minutes of the bilateral were dedicated to football.” In a bid to lock in the alliance, Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — expected back at work after Christmas following a health scare — has invited Keir Starmer for yet another visit next year. | Pool photo by Leon Neal via AFP/Getty Images Beneath the Arsenal chat, though, is a flurry of diplomatic activity more than a year in the making to build up the relationship.  Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who has said climate will be “central” to British foreign policy under Labour, visited Brazil last summer, before the general election.  Starmer, then the opposition leader, first met Lula at COP28 in 2023 and began the conversation, one U.K. official said, which last month resulted in the Clean Power Alliance energy deal, an 11-country bloc (plus the African Union) that has promised to work together on trebling renewable energy by 2030. Patriota praised the diplomatic signals sent out by a Lammy speech in September, with its “very explicit recognition of the asymmetries that penalize developing countries, and especially countries that are highly vulnerable to climate.”  And with the United States unlikely to be a reliable partner under Trump — whose pick for energy secretary, businessperson Chris Wright, has accused the U.K. of “impoverishing people” through its green policies — post-Brexit Britain needs new friends (at least if it wants to get anything done). “There are not many successful social democrats in the world at the moment,” said Richard Lapper, a foreign policy consultant. “Arguably Starmer and Lula are two of them. They are swimming against the tide in a way.” In Brazil, Starmer sees an ally that can bridge divides between developed countries — the U.K.’s usual allies in the G7 or NATO — and developing countries in the G20 and beyond being courted by an emboldened China and Russia. The buddy-up “exemplifies collaboration between the Global North and South,” said a second U.K. government official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The personal connections go deeper still. When Energy Secretary Ed Miliband visited Brazil earlier this year — his first international trip in post — he met Lula’s top diplomatic adviser Celso Amorim, “someone he’s known for many years,” Patriota said. Amorim is a leading figure on the Brazilian left and a former student of Miliband’s Marxist academic father, Ralph Miliband. THE SHADOW OF PUTIN But the blossoming friendship carries risk for Starmer.  The two governments are far apart over a key foreign policy question — Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. The U.K. has maintained its place as a key military supplier to Ukraine under Starmer. The prime minister’s position has started to bend slightly, as the reality of Trump’s victory forces a rethink, but Lula has long called for a negotiated settlement (while condemning Russia’s invasion). Last year he accused the U.S. of “encouraging” the conflict, and was rebuked by the Americans in turn for “parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda.”  Brazil is also close to China, its biggest trading partner, and relies on Russia for fertilizer to supply its vast agricultural sector. | Claudio Reis/Getty Images Brazil is also close to China, its biggest trading partner, and relies on Russia for fertilizer to supply its vast agricultural sector.  Patriota said that such differences need not stand in the way of climate collaboration with the U.K. But he added: “It strikes Brazil — and this is a point that President Lula often makes, he made it at the G20 — that we find it so difficult to raise a level of financial support to combat climate change … [but] nations around the world applaud when military budgets go up.” The stark difference in tone between Brasília and London on military matters comes at a time when the U.K. plans to increase defense spending to 2.5 percent in the face of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. In a “multipolar, complex and unpredictable world,” the U.K. could nonetheless use new friends, said Chatham House’s Niblett. “We’re about to enter really choppy waters. We’re going to have to be a coalition-builder — because America is not going to be.” NEXT STOP, BELÉM It is already possible to make out the contours of the U.K.-Brazil relationship next year.  Brazil hosts the U.N.’s global climate summit COP30 in 2025, at the same time the two countries celebrate 200 years of formal diplomatic relations. For much of that period, the two — now the world’s sixth and tenth biggest economies — haven’t felt the need to create much of an alliance. COP30 is another chance to change that. Brazil has a target of ending illegal deforestation by 2030, with stewardship of the world’s greatest rainforest a pillar of its international climate responsibilities. The U.K.’s Labour government has positioned itself as a global leader on climate and has its own 2030 ambition: cutting fossil fuels almost entirely from its electricity supply. Patriota, Lula’s man in London, stuck to diplomatic language and did not name Trump when discussing the relationship. Instead, he stressed that Brazil and Britain wanted to set “examples of active and responsible behavior” on climate, “independently of what other players may decide to do or not.” Niblett said: “If the U.K. is seen as the more predictable player on the green agenda, then we may get more of the foreign investment into our efforts to drive green transition.” That would help Starmer with his clean energy mission at home, he added — “because we’ve got very little domestic dosh to put into that process.” Trade and investment would be on the agenda for any visit next year, Patriota added. “Trade between Brazil and the U.K. could be [at] much higher levels than it is today,” he said. But some experts played down the trade relationship. The U.K., relatively speaking, is a “bit player” in economic importance to Brazil, said Lapper. Brazil is the U.K.’s 28th largest trading partner, accounting for 0.6 percent of total U.K. trade, according to the latest Whitehall data. And Starmer will need to tread carefully. Free-trade negotiations between the European Union and Mercosur, the South American trade bloc of which Brazil is part, took 25 years and still face opposition from farmers in France and elsewhere, over fears they will be undercut by cheap imports. The agreement “risks having dramatic consequences for agriculture,” said Arnaud Rousseau, head of the country’s powerful French FNSEA association. Starmer, already facing the fury of U.K. farmers, can ill afford to anger rural voters even more. But with such an unpromising geopolitical backdrop, both countries seem determined not to let potential pitfalls stand in the way of action on a shared priority — climate. Both can play “a significant role in today’s world affairs,” Patriota said. “In the case of Brazil, you could describe it as an emerging role. It is the first time in our history. “In the case of Britain — perhaps a moment where Britain is trying to redefine its position in international affairs.”

BAKU, Azerbaijan — It was the most trumpeted achievement of last year’s climate conference. One year later, it’s nowhere to be found. The call to “transition away” from coal, oil and gas that came out of December’s COP28 summit in Dubai was historic — the first time 200 countries, including major oil and gas producers such as Saudi Arabia and the United States, had explicitly agreed on the need to wind down fossil fuels. But in Baku, Azerbaijan, COP29 is taking place after a U.S. election that handed the presidency back to Donald Trump, who has vowed to massively expand oil and gas production. And the host country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, used his keynote address to call fossil fuel resources a “gift of the God.” Against that backdrop, even getting this summit to reiterate last year’s nonbinding agreement has faced “pushback,” Lars Aagaard, Denmark’s climate minister, told reporters on Thursday. And some advocates for strong climate action appeared to be accepting defeat. Money is still the most contentious issue at the Azerbaijan summit: Less than 24 hours before talks were scheduled to conclude on Friday, negotiators were still battling behind closed doors about how many hundreds of billions of dollars in climate aid for poorer nations should come from wealthy governments such as the U.S. and the European Union. But the question of how to handle the 2023 fossil fuel pledge is a symbol of how far global climate politics have shifted. A group of 22 Arab countries has refused to accept any mention of the fossil fuel language, according to three European negotiators, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. During a public meeting on Thursday, Saudi Arabian negotiator Albara Tawfiq, speaking on behalf of the Arab group, said any reference to fossil fuels would be “unacceptable.” “The Arab group will not accept any text that targets any specific sectors, including fossil fuels, and no proposal on economic policies in developing countries even on an encouragement basis,” he said. Ugandan Energy Minister Ruth Nankabirwa told POLITICO the country wanted the freedom to exploit its own energy resources: “Any statement which would be towards phasing out completely of fossil fuel, that Uganda does not support. It is not just. It is not just.” Failing to repeat the fossil fuel language from COP28 would be disappointing, said Colombia’s minister of environment and sustainable development, Susana Muhamad. “What is the point of having an agreement and a convention if we cannot deal with the issue that creates the problem?” she asked. An early draft of the final deal for the COP29 talks, released early Thursday, contained no mention of fossil fuels and no commitment to the broader Dubai agreement. G20 leaders who met this week in Rio de Janeiro said they “welcome and fully subscribe” to last year’s agreement, but declined to repeat its contents. At a press conference on Thursday in Baku, Aagaard would say only that the fossil fuels pledge was “close” to a red line for Denmark. “Everybody’s going to go away somewhat unhappy tomorrow,” said Ireland’s climate minister, Eamon Ryan. “There’s going to be red lines crossed.” And while rich countries and those nations vulnerable to climate change insist that the talks must also send a clear signal on cutting greenhouse gas pollution, Ryan suggested that the talks on delivering a new finance goal should not collapse over it. Failure to get a deal “would be unforgivable, would be historically shameful,” he said. “And we can’t do that, we have to reach compromise.” The European Union has insisted that the final agreement in Baku needs a strong component on cutting emissions, describing any backtracking as a “red line.” But senior European negotiators appeared open to not repeating the fossil fuel language this week. “What we would like to avoid — that’s a red line — is watering down the agreed text,” said Attila Steiner, co-leader of the EU’s COP29 team, in an interview on Wednesday. The EU could “live with” just restating last year’s language, he added. When asked whether there needs to be an explicit reference to fossil fuels again, Steiner said: “What we agreed in Dubai … it’s a package. The exact wording is a different question.” Instead, Europeans appeared keen to focus their attention on a deal that describes how countries will move away from fossil fuels. In a statement to reporters Wednesday, German climate envoy Jen Morgan said COP29 needs to speed up the implementation of the energy goals agreed in Dubai, but did not mention the fossil fuel transition call when enumerating what that means. “Concretely, we are looking for a decision on the need to cooperate on the expansion of electricity grids and energy storage, as well as the promotion of green skills, the tackling of all fossil fuel subsidies [and] agreeing no new coal,” she said.

BRUSSELS — Reaching the landmark renewable energy targets agreed at last year’s global climate summit will remain a distant dream unless the world invests more than $30 trillion over the next six years.  That’s the stark warning the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) delivered Friday at the final ministerial meeting ahead of next month’s United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan, known as COP29, where financing for climate action will take center stage.  At last year’s COP28 conference in Dubai, countries pledged to collectively triple the world’s renewable energy capacity and double energy-saving efforts by 2030. The commitments were hailed as key to limiting global warming in line with the Paris Agreement.   IRENA’s first progress assessment, published Friday, gives the world a failing grade across the board. For the tripling target, the agency found that countries are on track for only half the renewable power growth required to meet the goal.  Stronger policies, easier permitting and modernizing power grids are crucial to making up for the shortfall — as is a dramatic surge in investment, according to IRENA.  Investment in renewables reached a record high of $570 billion last year, but what’s needed is $1.5 trillion a year, IRENA says. And spending on energy-saving measures must increase seven-fold to reach the doubling target, from $323 million last year to $2.2 trillion annually.  In total, reaching the twin COP28 targets requires a cumulative global investment of $31.5 trillion in renewables, grids, energy efficiency and related measures by 2030, according to IRENA.  The findings are likely to bolster developing countries’ push for a massive increase in financial support. IRENA’s assessment comes just one month before the start of COP29, where countries are meant to agree on a new collective financial target to fund climate action — crucially, switching from fossil fuels to renewables — in developing countries.  Some proposals to replace the current target of $100 billion a year reach up to $1.3 trillion. But developed countries and the European Union argue that any significant increase in public finance requires emerging economies like China to start chipping in, and that the majority of investments must come from the private sector, not national budgets.  IRENA says a “major scale-up” in both public and private financing is required to increase the share of investment in developing countries.  The vast majority of investment in renewables last year — 84 percent — was channeled into the EU, China and the United States. India and Brazil accounted for around 6 percent; investments in Africa are minuscule and actually halved between 2022 and 2023.  IRENA’s progress assessment finds the world falling short on almost every measure, aside from solar power.  IRENA’s progress assessment finds the world falling short on almost every measure, aside from solar power. | Giovanni Grezzi/AFP via Getty Images To reach the COP28 tripling target, installed renewables capacity would have to increase from 3.9 terawatts (TW) today to 11.2 TW by the end of the decade, the agency says. But current national targets are projected to add only another 3.5 TW to reach 7.4 TW by 2030.  Countries’ plans submitted to the U.N. under the Paris Agreement — known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs — suggest even weaker growth, reaching only 5.4 TW by 2030. Governments are required to submit updated NDCs next year; IRENA says that the new set of plans must “more than double” their renewables targets.  Solar is the only renewable technology growing at the required level. Onshore wind needs to triple, while offshore wind and bioenergy should increase six-fold. Geothermal capacity ought to grow 35 times faster than it did last year to meet its projected share.  On energy efficiency, “little meaningful progress has been made” over the past year, IRENA says. Some key measures to save energy include renovating old buildings and boosting electrification, as electric vehicles and heat pumps consume less energy than their fossil fuel counterparts.  Yet while EV sales reached a record 18 percent of total global car sales last year, the picture is dire for heat pumps, the agency warns: After a brief surge in 2022, their sales fell by 3 percent in 2023, with a particularly notable decline in Europe.