UK forest finance, 2021–2025
Explore how the UK's international climate finance for forests was spent by government department and by individual programme between 2021 and 2025, with the full data available to download.
Forest Department spend
#ICF Forest Spend by Department (2021-2025)
Three government departments deliver UK forest finance:
- Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)
- Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ)
- Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
The visualisations below show how UK climate finance for forests has been spent across departments and programmes over the first four years of the ICF3 commitment period.
Forest department spend observation
- Unlike overall nature spend, which is dominated by FCDO, forest spend is split fairly evenly between DESNZ (52% of total forest ICF spend) and FCDO (41%), with DEFRA delivering the remaining 7%.
- As with overall ICF spend, the first two years of the ICF3 period saw total rates of recorded ICF forest spend fall substantially below the annual average spend required to meet the pledge.
- While aggregate recorded spend then rose above the required annual rate in 2023/24 and 2024/25, total spend in 2025/26 will still need to be at least £523.9m in order to meet the UK's £1.5bn forest commitment. As of February 2026, the Government continues to state that it is on track to deliver this.
- Despite the five-year ICF3 ending in March 2026 the UK Government has not yet committed to a forest sub-pledge in ICF4, which will commence the following month. Unless any such political commitment is made it is anticipated that the UK rate of international forest finance spend will collapse from April 2026.
Forest programmes
#ICF for forest spend by programme (2021-2025)
Top forest programmes by spend
Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions
DESNZ
£153.88 million
Green Climate Fund (1st replenishment / 2nd replenishment)
FCDO
£146.37 million
Mobilising Finance for Forests
DESNZ
£93.64 million
Forest programme spend observation
- FCDO records forest ICF spend through the largest number of individual programmes, with 18 programmes reporting some forest ICF spend in at least one year of ICF3 (to date), compared to 12 for DEFRA and 12 for DESNZ.
- Forest spend is highly concentrated: the five largest programmes in this list together account for 56.1% of total forest ICF spend, with the top two alone making up 30.8%.
- There is a predominant role for multilateral (e.g. Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility) and multi-bilateral (e.g. SCALE, Mobilising Finance for Forests, Amazon Fund) programmes in the UK's current forest ICF spend.
- The Biodiverse Landscapes Fund (BLF) is a £100 million DEFRA programme spanning six landscapes globally, yet it has received just £12.3 million (1.3% of total forest ICF spend) to date.
Download forest data
#The underlying forest data behind every chart and table on this page is available to download in Excel format.
Programme spend data
Spend broken down by individual programme, including the full list of forest programmes reporting ICF spend and their project-level detail.
Download forest programme dataData last updated: August 2026
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