Despite long standing international commitments to spend 0.7% of national income on foreign aid, Australia’s support for developing countries has declined significantly over the past fifty years.

In recent years, Australian governments have begun to shift their emphasis away from their failure to meet promised Official Development Assistance (ODA) and towards poorly defined commitments to increase spending on ‘climate finance’. But even when these new commitments are included, Australia is not just failing to meet its stated targets, but falling further behind them.

It is relatively easy for the governments of OECD countries, including Australia, to claim that they are increasing ‘climate finance’ when in reality their ODA commitments are stagnating or even falling.

Significantly, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) a key principle is that climate finance should be in addition to ODA, not a substitution for ODA and not double counted.

On that basis, it is clear that the Australian Government’s climate finance contribution in the five years to 2025 is zero dollars.