A New Political and Funding Reality for Environmental Peacebuilding

Apr 22, 2025 | Conflict and Environment Observatory
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The Trump administration’s January 2025 decision to freeze all foreign assistance funding has had massive and reverberating consequences for humanitarian, development and conservation programmes in areas affected by conflicts and fragility – for example, leading to thousands of job losses from humanitarian mine action programmes and halting emergency food aid in Sudan. Since then, the UK government has followed the US’s lead, cutting foreign aid by around £6 billion to fund increased defence spending. Other European and NATO countries, including France, Sweden and the Netherlands, have made similar moves to greatly reduce spending on direct foreign assistance at a time where there are more active conflicts than at any point since WWII.