If green finance is to serve collective wellbeing rather than the interests of a privileged few, we need rigorous and proactive public regulations.
There’s a familiar version of climate action that feels reassuring by design. Governments commit public money, international partnerships take shape, and ambitious targets follow.
Britain's international climate programme - UK Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions, or UK PACT - fits neatly into that narrative, positioning itself as part of a coordinated global response to an escalating crisis.
READ MONICA PICCININI'S REPORT: A RECKONING IN THE AMAZON (PDF)
UK PACT funds projects in countries like Brazil with the aim of reducing emissions, protecting ecosystems, and unlocking “green” investment.
Implementation
At first glance, it looks exactly like what you would hope for. But as with many complex and large systems, the reality becomes more complicated the closer you look. So, the question isn’t whether work is happening, but whether that work leads to meaningful change on the ground.
It’s easy to assume that climate funding flows directly to where it’s most urgently needed: forests, communities or critical infrastructure. In fact, the journey is rarely that straightforward.
Funds move from taxpayers to government programmes, and then on to delivery partners, often consultancies, think tanks and international NGOs.
Organisations including the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), the Talanoa Institute, the Climate Bonds Initiative,Imaflora, Conexsus, The Climate Group, the AYA Institute, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Brasil, and others, are all participants in this space.
If green finance is to serve collective wellbeing rather than the interests of a privileged few, we need rigorous and proactive public regulations.
Their work is often focused on technical assistance, policy design and financial frameworks, although some also may also support or partner in on-the-ground implementation.
Wealthiest
But the role of these organisations raises a broader question: how much of climate funding is ultimately spent on enabling action, and how much actually delivers it? This isn’t about misconduct, it’s about structure.
The more layers money passes through, the harder it becomes to trace a clear line from funding to outcomes, whether that’s emissions, protecting land or tangible benefits for communities.
According to CPI, early data indicates that global climate finance exceeded $2 trillion in 2024, having reached $1.9 trillion in 2023.
Maud Borie, a senior lecturer and Professor Sarah Bracking, both at King’s College London, wrote an important article for The Conversation, titled Why ‘green’ finance isn’t sustainable as it seems.
It stated: “Mounting evidence suggests a gap between the suggested possibilities and the actual outcomes of green finance. Many green finance products appear to serve financial markets and the wealthiest investors more than nature or vulnerable communities.
Multilateral
“Even more concerning are the unintended consequences. Far from levelling the playing field, green finance can exacerbate inequality.
“If green finance is to serve collective wellbeing rather than the interests of a privileged few, we need rigorous and proactive public regulations and better public debates on what green finance ought to account for”.
The UK International Climate Finance (ICF) isn’t a single fund, but a cross-government system shared between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
Together, these departments oversee a broad portfolio of climate spending covering forests, energy transition, adaptation and sustainable development.
A significant portion of this funding doesn’t go directly to projects. Instead, it’s channelled through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and United Nations agencies.
Tangible
In Brazil, British climate finance amounts to more than £510 million committed since 2016, making the country one of the ICF’s top recipients.
The cash is spread across a wide range of initiatives: tackling deforestation, restoring ecosystems, promoting sustainable agriculture, strengthening Brazil’s bioeconomy policy and expanding green finance and clean energy systems. The result is less a unified strategy than a collection of parallel efforts.
UK PACT is managed by FCDO and DESNZ, and focuses largely on technical assistance, working upstream, shaping policies and financial systems rather than directly delivering projects.
In Brazil, UK PACT and the Green Finance Institute (GFI) play complementary upstream roles, with UK PACT funding technical assistance and policy support through intermediaries, and GFI focusing on developing green finance frameworks and investment pipelines.
This alignment helps mobilise capital but also means much of the effort sits in enabling systems rather than direct delivery, making the link between funding and tangible outcomes on the ground harder to trace.
Targets
GFI funders include the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, HM Government, the City of London, the Esmée Faribairn Foundation, the Laudes Foundation, the MCS Foundation, the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the LTPP Foundation, Amalgamated Bank and Climate Change Collaboration.
One of the least visible but most influential parts of climate finance lies in how it’s defined.
Specialist organisations such as the Climate Policy Initiative and the Climate Bonds Initiative help determine what counts as green investment, while advisory groups such as Talanoa help translate these definitions into policy and financial systems, shaping how progress is measured.
This process isn’t always neutral. When definitions expand, more activities can be labelled as climate finance, including investments that may have happened anyway. In those cases, reported progress can reflect alignment rather than genuine transformation.
This can create a subtle gap. Financial flows increase, targets are met on paper, but the connection to real-world environmental outcomes becomes harder to pin down.
Deforestation
Once these frameworks reach Brazil, they encounter a far more complex reality, one shaped by politics, economic pressures and long-standing power structures.
At the centre is BNDES, Brazil’s national development bank, which plays a major role in directing investment. It has deep ties to large industries and infrastructure projects, and significant influence over the country’s economic trajectory.
Climate finance entering this system doesn’t necessarily transform it. More often, it adapts to it. That may create risk: funding intended to drive change can end up reinforcing existing structures, including those linked to environmental destruction.
In the Amazon rainforest, British-backed projects often focus on sustainable land use, certification systems and environmental monitoring. These are well-established tools, but they come with limitations. Organisations such as Imaflora and IPAM contribute expertise in these areas.
“Sustainable logging” still involves cutting trees and certification schemes can vary in how rigorously they’re enforced. And protecting one area can shift deforestation pressures elsewhere.
Assumptions
A significant share of funding also goes into monitoring. Brazil already has sophisticated satellite systems that track deforestation in real time. The issue isn’t simply knowing where it’s happening, it’s acting on that information consistently and effectively.
More data can help, but on its own, it doesn’t stop deforestation and degradation.
Carbon markets are another key piece of the puzzle. In theory, they offer a way to reduce emissions by assigning value to carbon reductions. In practice, some systems allow companies to offset emissions while buying credits elsewhere.
This is something that has sparked ongoing debate about whether this leads to real reductions or delays them.
Investigations into forest-based carbon credits have raised serious concerns about their credibility. Some projects fail to deliver real emissions reductions. Others rely on assumptions that are difficult to verify.
Pressure
The result is a system that can, at times, balance emissions on paper without clearly reducing them. It’s an appealing idea, but not a straightforward one.
There’s a growing interest in decarbonising Brazil’s heavy industries, particularly steel and cement, using technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.
The idea is compelling: cleaner fuels, capture emissions, continued industrial output. But the gap between concept and reality remains significant.
Both hydrogen and carbon capture and storage technologies exist and are being tested in pilot and early commercial settings. However, as outlined in the Climate Bonds Initiative report on cement and steel decarbonisation, they aren’t yet deployed at the scale needed to meaningfully reduce emissions across heavy industry.
Hydrogen is often presented as a cleaner substitute for coal in steelmaking, particularly when it’s produced using renewable energy. The problem is that this kind of hydrogen is still expensive and not widely available, especially in countries where energy systems are already under pressure.
Emissions
In Brazil, scaling this up would require massive new infrastructure and long-term investment that doesn’t yet exist. For now, it remains more of a long-term ambition, rather than something delivering cuts in emissions today.
Carbon capture and storage face similar challenges. It’s costly, energy-intensive and not yet used in steel production at commercial scale.
There are also questions about where all that captured carbon goes and how safe it’s to store it long term. The same report makes clear that these systems are still a long way from being reliable, large-scale solutions.
This leaves a gap between ambition and reality.
Technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture and storage are being used to tell a reassuring story rather than deliver immediate change. When they’re counted as part of today’s climate progress, it can give the impression that emissions are being tackled more directly than they are in practice.
Flows
Across all these areas, one pattern becomes clear: outcomes are shaped not only by intentions, but by incentives.
Organisations are funded to design solutions, governments are expected to show progress, and financial institutions benefit when more investments qualify as green.
In that environment, activity itself can become the focus. Progress is often easier to demonstrate through frameworks, metrics and reports than through measurable environmental change.
There’s little incentive to admit something isn’t working, and even less to simplify systems that depend on complexity.
Meanwhile, those people most affected, local communities, often remain on the edges of funding flows. The system speaks in their name but rarely puts resources directly in their hands.
Repackage
None of this means that programmes like UK PACT are unnecessary, but it does highlight how difficult it is to ensure that funding translates into tangible results.
The central issue isn’t whether money is being spent, but how impact is defined, and whether those definitions reflect what’s happening on the ground.
When success is measured through financial flows and policy alignment, the link to lived reality can start to weaken and that’s where trust begins to erode.
In a paper published in Geography Compass, the authors argue that climate finance often appears more transformative than it is. While funds are presented as tools to cut emissions and support vulnerable communities, they largely operate within existing political and economic systems rather than reshaping them.
In some cases, what’s counted as green investment may simply repackage business-as-usual activity, creating the impression of progress without delivering meaningful environmental change.
Power
More critically, the paper highlights how these flows can deepen existing imbalances of power. Rather than redistributing resources, climate finance can concentrate them, raising questions about who benefits and who’s left out.
It ultimately challenges the idea of climate finance as a neutral solution, pointing instead to a system that can just as easily reproduce the inequalities it aims to solve.
Lauren Gifford, lead author of the paper, highlighted the opacity and influence of financial systems.
She said: “Finance is complex and often confusing, and it can be a black box for many of us, obscuring how capital is created, traded and accumulated. We need more scientists to think about intersections of money, finance, technology and climate change. Those spaces maintain a lot of power in how climate change is addressed.”
The point is not to dismiss climate finance programmes, but to look at them more critically.
Complexity
Greater transparency, clearer links between funding and outcomes, and more direct support for frontline action are often mentioned as ways forward. Just as important is the willingness to question how success is defined.
Forests remain under pressure, communities continue to face risk, emissions are still rising, and yet, on paper, progress continues.
In the end, the story of the British climate funding in Brazil isn’t one of clear failure or success. It’s a story about complexity, and about the need to look closely at systems that appear, at first glance, to be working.
So, the question remains: are we changing the course of climate change or just getting better at describing our efforts to do so?
This Author
Monica Piccinini is a Brazilian-British journalist and a member of the National Union of Journalists. She is a regular contributor to The Ecologist and publishes on Substack, Medium and on her own platform, YourVoiz.org. Read Monica Piccinini's report: A reckoning in the amazon (pdf).
