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What you should know about this indicator

  • Official development assistance (ODA) is aid given to countries and territories on the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) list of recipients and multilateral development institutions. To qualify as ODA, the aid has to serve the economic development and welfare of recipient countries and be either a grant or a loan with favorable terms.
  • Donors mark their bilateral aid projects with the "Rio markers", which track support for the three UN conventions from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: on climate change (with separate markers for mitigation and adaptation), biodiversity, and desertification. For each marker, a goal is a "principal" objective (the project wouldn't have been funded without it), a "significant" objective (an explicit but secondary one), or not targeted.
  • This data covers bilateral allocable ODA from DAC members, the major donor countries in the OECD and EU institutions. This is the bilateral aid that the Rio markers apply to. It excludes general budget support, debt relief (other than debt swaps), administrative costs, development awareness, and the costs of hosting refugees and students from developing countries in donor countries. It also excludes core contributions to multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, and aid from donors outside the DAC. We also leave out the European Investment Bank, which doesn't use the Rio markers.
  • Climate change mitigation projects aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or increase their removal by carbon sinks. Climate change adaptation projects aim to reduce the vulnerability of people and ecosystems to the impacts of climate change.
  • Many projects target both mitigation and adaptation, so we count each project once: as mitigation only, adaptation only, or both. Climate is a project's principal objective if either marker is principal, and a significant objective otherwise.
  • Projects count at their full value even when climate is only a significant objective, so the OECD calls this data descriptive rather than strictly quantitative. Donors mark their own projects, so for some it's hard to tell whether climate change was the reason for the aid, or just a label on a project that would have gone ahead anyway.
  • The data shows commitments: aid pledged, rather than aid disbursed. The OECD applies the Rio markers to commitments because they describe projects as designed. A multi-year project counts in full in the year it is committed, so values can change a lot from year to year.
  • The adaptation marker was introduced in 2009 and applies to aid from 2010, when this data starts. Before then, the climate marker also covered some adaptation projects, so climate-related aid can't be split into mitigation and adaptation.
  • Projects that donors did not assess against the climate markers ("not screened") count as non-climate aid. This was common in the early 2010s and still is for some donors. Donors that leave only their non-climate projects unscreened are unaffected; donors that leave almost all their projects unscreened can show little or no climate-related aid even if they gave some.
  • Entities named "regional (OECD)" or "unspecified (OECD)", such as "Africa, regional (OECD)", show aid that donors did not assign to a single country, for example programs covering several countries. This aid is included in the totals of the corresponding regions, such as Africa (OECD).
Share of foreign aid received that is climate-related
OECD
Bilateral allocable that targets climate change mitigation, adaptation, or both, as a share of bilateral allocable ODA. Monetary aid is estimated as commitments.
Source
OECD (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 7, 2026
Next expected update
October 2027
Date range
2010–2024
Unit
% of bilateral allocable ODA

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

OECD – RioMarkers: Aid (ODA) activities targeting global environmental objectives

This dataset contains bilateral commitment data on aid in support of environmental sustainability and aid to biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database.

In their reporting to the DAC CRS, donors are requested to indicate for each activity whether it targets environment and the Rio Conventions (biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification) or not. A scoring system of three values is used, in which aid activities are marked as targeting environment as the "principal" or "significant" objective, or not at all. The same activity can be marked for several objectives, so caution should be used to avoid double-counting.

The markers on biodiversity, climate change mitigation and desertification were introduced in 1998, and the marker on climate change adaptation applies to flows from 2010 onwards.

Retrieved on
October 22, 2026
Retrieved from
https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_RIOMRKR%40DF_RIOMARKERS&df[ag]=OECD.DCD.FSD
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
OECD (2026). RioMarkers: Aid (ODA) activities targeting global environmental objectives. OECD Data Explorer.

This dataset contains bilateral commitment data on aid in support of environmental sustainability and aid to biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database.

In their reporting to the DAC CRS, donors are requested to indicate for each activity whether it targets environment and the Rio Conventions (biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification) or not. A scoring system of three values is used, in which aid activities are marked as targeting environment as the "principal" or "significant" objective, or not at all. The same activity can be marked for several objectives, so caution should be used to avoid double-counting.

The markers on biodiversity, climate change mitigation and desertification were introduced in 1998, and the marker on climate change adaptation applies to flows from 2010 onwards.

Retrieved on
October 22, 2026
Retrieved from
https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_RIOMRKR%40DF_RIOMARKERS&df[ag]=OECD.DCD.FSD
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
OECD (2026). RioMarkers: Aid (ODA) activities targeting global environmental objectives. OECD Data Explorer.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We combined the mitigation and adaptation markers of each project to count it only once. Projects marked as targeting both objectives (as a principal or significant objective) are counted as "mitigation and adaptation", and the others as "mitigation only" or "adaptation only". Projects with climate as the principal objective are those marked as principal for mitigation or adaptation; the remaining climate-related projects have climate as a significant objective.

We calculated this indicator by dividing climate-related ODA by bilateral allocable ODA, expressed as a percentage.

We calculated aggregates for groups of recipients (such as regions or income groups) by summing the indicator across the recipients that the OECD currently includes in each group. For income groups, this applies the most recent classification to all years.

We left out aid from the European Investment Bank (EIB), one of the EU institutions, as the OECD does in its own climate-related shares. The EIB tracks its climate finance with a different method, not with the Rio markers, so all its aid would otherwise count as non-climate aid.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of foreign aid received that is climate-related”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Pablo Arriagada, Simon van Teutem, and Hannah Ritchie (2024) - “Foreign Aid”. Data adapted from OECD. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-101029/grapher/share-foreign-aid-received-climate.html [online resource] (archived on October 22, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

OECD (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

OECD (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of foreign aid received that is climate-related – OECD” [dataset]. OECD, “RioMarkers: Aid (ODA) activities targeting global environmental objectives” [original data]. Retrieved October 22, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-101029/grapher/share-foreign-aid-received-climate.html (archived on October 22, 2026).

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