Abstract:

Australia and other donors have promised to provide developing countries with new and additional funding to address issues associated with climate change. As most of Australia’s climate finance currently comes from aid, “new and additional” climate finance would appear to require increased Australian aid flows. Yet, although reported climate aid has increased since 2018, overall Australian aid has not. In this paper we study this apparent discrepancy. Focusing on aid delivered to help countries adapt to climate change, we find there has been a rapid rise in the share of Australian aid projects claimed to be climate-adaptation related since 2019. Many of these projects were once viewed as not climate change relevant. We use multiple regressions to identify an important consequence of this change: prior to 2019, Australian projects in countries more vulnerable to climate change were more likely to be significantly adaptation focused than projects in less vulnerable countries. After 2019, this pattern reversed: vulnerability was associated with a lower probability of a significant adaptation focus.