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. This paper provides an overview of the concepts and measurement of the OECD’s and Australia’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) and climate finance contributions. It shows that Australia’s track record is poor with regard to both ODA and climate finance. 

In recent years, Australian governments have begun to shift their emphasis away from their failure to meet promised 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. 

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, the paper finds that the Australian Government’s climate finance contribution in the five years to 2025 is zero dollars.

Key findings

• The Australian Government is spending 0.19% of Gross National Income (GNI) on foreign aid (Official Development Assistance or ODA), far below the Labor policy goal of 0.5%.
• Since 1970, Australia’s ODA as a share GNI has remained on a downward trend, well below the global target of 0.7%.
• On the principle of strong additionality, namely that climate finance should be on top of the 0.7% target, Australia provides zero dollars of climate finance to help its Pacific neighbours address climate change.