Germany misses international climate finance target amid budget cuts

Germany has missed its target of providing at least 6 billion euros in climate finance from its federal budget in 2025 for climate mitigation and adaptation in poorer countries, government data showed. Germany provided a total of 4.7 billion euros last year for projects to, for example, adapt food supply to the consequences of climate change, or supporting policies to decarbonise energy supply and industry production. 

NGO Oxfam said that international support is necessary, particularly for low-income countries, in the face of the worsening climate crisis, and emphasised that Germany has played an important leading role in this area in the past. However, missing the 2025 target “is a blow to the hard-won trust built with those countries,” said Oxfam’s Jan Kowalzig, arguing that trust, cooperation and solidarity are key in tackling the global climate crisis. The news “casts a shadow” over the upcoming negotiations at the UN climate change conference COP31 in Turkey. 

Germany’s government under former chancellor Angela Merkel had set itself the 6-billion-euro target, and the country overshot the goal in 2022 and 2024, dipping just below it in 2023. Since then, however, a budget crisis and the priorities of the new coalition government led to significant cuts for the development ministry, which was responsible for about 85 percent of Germany’s international climate finance in 2025. Other major donors, such as the UK and the US, have also heavily cut back international aid.

The current government said in its coalition agreement that Germany would “provide its fair share of international climate finance” and increasingly bet on private funds and non-traditional donors. Development minister Reem Alabali-Radovan defended the government's record, saying Germany "stands by its goals for international climate protection" and is increasingly leveraging capital markets and private investment as public budgets shrink.

At the UN climate change conference COP29 in Azerbaijan in 2024, countries had agreed to triple global public climate finance to developing countries from the current target of 100 billion US dollars annually to 300 billion dollars by 2035. This would also include other financing, such as private funds leveraged by state budgets. Germany provided a total of almost 11 billion euros in 2025 if mobilised funds (e.g. public loans) and leveraged private funds are included, the government said.

Oxfam’s Kowalzig argued that the cuts “are evidence of short-sightedness,” as climate finance was also an instrument for global stability, building trusting international partnerships in geopolitically challenging times. “It therefore also serves Germany’s economic, foreign and security policy interests,” he said.