Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she has taken to ensure that Official Development Assistance is not spent on fossil fuel projects.

Countries need reliable and sustainable supplies of energy if they are to tackle poverty effectively by growing their economies, creating jobs, and delivering essential services. UK aid is focused on helping them achieve this, and our support for energy is increasingly invested in renewables. Since 2011, the UK has provided 26 million people with improved access to clean energy and installed 1,600 MW of clean energy capacity, avoiding 16 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2019, in the Green Finance Strategy, the Government committed to aligning the UK’s Official Development Assistance with the goals of the Paris international climate change agreement, including our support for energy.

The Government has also announced that the UK will double our international climate finance to £11.6 billion between 2021/22 and 2025/26. A significant proportion of this funding will be invested in clean energy, including up to £1 billion in developing and testing new technology in areas such as energy storage, innovations in renewable energy, cooling, low carbon and electric transport and technologies for industrial decarbonisation. This funding for innovation is targeted at driving forward the clean energy transition in developing countries, by creating and demonstrating new technologies and business models to deploy them.