What's happening in Mozambique?

Government pulls funding from Mozambique gas project

The UK government has decided not to use £900 million of taxpayers’ money to support the controversial Mozambique liquified natural gas (LNG) project. 

Find out how Friends of the Earth has opposed UK involvement over many years.

Recent developments

October 2024

• Friends of the Earth warned the newly elected government that continued support for the project would be unlawful.
• The then Foreign Secretary David Lammy used his first major speech to say the UK wanted to be a global climate leader.
• Partly prompted by TotalEnergies wanting to re-start the project, the Labour government decided to review support.

1 December 2025

• Business Secretary Peter Kyle announced that the UK government would no longer fund the project citing risks and lack of benefit to the UK.
• Friends of the Earth’s Chief Executive Asad Rehman welcomed the government's decision citing human rights abuses.
• Alongside the UK government’s announcement, the Dutch government also announced that it was ending support for the project.

The UK government is absolutely right to withdraw support for this deeply damaging and controversial development – and deserves credit for doing so. This Mozambique gas project is a huge carbon timebomb, linked to serious human rights abuses. It should never have been given UK taxpayer-funded support in the first place. We now urge other countries to follow suit and end their backing for this destructive project. The UK should instead support countries like Mozambique - which are on the frontline of the climate crisis - by helping them adapt to its impacts and invest in their abundant clean energy resources to bring affordable energy to the 60% of the country locked into energy poverty.

Asad Rehman, Friends of the Earth Chief Executive

Mozambique: the background

Mozambique is an exploited country in south east Africa. It's on the frontline of the climate crisis. In the words of UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency:

Cyclones, floods, and droughts have uprooted hundreds of thousands of people in recent years… [and] become increasingly intense and frequent. Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record, devastated eight provinces in early 2023, displacing 184,000 people and leaving 1.1 million in need of aid. Flooding and droughts are threatening livelihoods, particularly for... communities reliant on farming.

UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency

What is the Mozambique gas project and why is it controversial?

• French oil giant Total wants to extract gas from the seabed off the coast of Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, and ship this around the world in liquified form (liquified natural gas or LNG).
• The project is a carbon timebomb with huge climate impacts.
• The emissions from the gas produced over the project’s lifetime would be greater than the combined annual emissions of all 27 EU countries.
• It's estimated that the construction phase of the project alone would increase the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Mozambique by up to 10%.

It has also been linked with horrific human rights abuses and huge numbers of people being displaced. In March 2021, horrifying news started to emerge from Mozambique: killings, beheadings, and entire communities fleeing the Cabo Delgado region. Shockingly, this has been going on for some time. Armed groups have been terrorising civilians since 2017, leaving thousands dead and forcing almost 700,000 people to flee the violence. Some had to flee to the neighbouring province, and many are in refugee centres. Recent reports show that the horrors are continuing.

The Mozambican government wants the world to believe that the violence is a simple case of "foreign Islamist terrorists" trying to gain a foothold in the country.

But the reality is not that simple. Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world and is still recovering from a bloody civil war. When vast quantities of natural gas were discovered off the coast of Cabo Delgado in 2010, the region became the focus of energy giants, insurgents and government, who wanted to cash in on the gas at any cost.

Increased military presence has led to reports of human rights abuses by the army, such as killing local people and extorting and blackmailing families for the financial compensation they received from Total. Impoverished and disillusioned local people are now a prime recruitment target for the insurgents.

How was the UK involved?

TotalEnergies wanted national governments involved to help access cheaper capital.

In 2020, the government agreed that UK Export Finance (UKEF), a government agency, should support the project with $1.15 billion (about £900 million) of taxpayers’ money in the form of loan guarantees. These would back UK companies supplying goods and services to the project.

At the time, the prime minister Boris Johnson complained that he had been ‘bounced into’ supporting the deal, which was strongly supported by International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, despite the opposition of Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Business & Energy Secretary Alok Sharma.

The decision to support the project was the last one before the UK decided to end government support for fossil fuel projects overseas. The project was also financed by export credit agencies from other countries including the USA, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan and South Africa; and by banks including JPMorgan Chase, Société Générale and UK-based Standard Chartered.

However, the UK’s money was not handed over, as in April 2021 TotalEnergies declared ‘force majeure’ (a clause in contracts that removes liability for natural and unavoidable catastrophes) as a result of the situation on the ground and stopped work on the project.

Friends of the Earth legal involvement

 In December 2021, Friends of the Earth brought a judicial review challenge to the High Court against the UK government's decision to back the project.

The grounds of the challenge were:

• Financing for the Mozambique LNG project was permitted after it was incorrectly judged to be compatible with the Paris Agreement
• We argued this decision was reached without proper assessment of the development’s climate impacts against the terms of the Paris Agreement
• The total emissions for the new gas field weren’t calculated as part of the government’s approval process, nor were they evaluated against the objective of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees as set out in the Paris Agreement.
• We also argued that funding a massive new gas field instead of renewables was a clear contradiction of the UK’s obligation to help other countries meet their own climate targets.

On 15 March 2022, Mrs Justice Thornton, one of the two judges who heard the case, ruled that the decision to support Mozambique LNG was unlawful. This was because UKEF had no rational basis to find the project was compatible with the UK's commitments under the Paris Agreement, partially due to UKEF failing to assess the project’s total emissions impact by taking into account those produced through the “end-use” of the gas, for example, when combusted in power plants. Mrs Justice Thornton also found that Ministers were deprived of an adequate understanding of the scale of emissions impact from the project.

This was a highly significant ruling, but in an extraordinary legal event, the judgment was split: while Mrs Justice Thornton upheld the grounds, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith dismissed them – with no majority view established.

The court instead disallowed the case on the basis that full consensus wasn’t reached by both judges, while also granting us permission to appeal. Our appeal was heard in December 2022, and in January 2023 the Court of Appeal rejected our challenge. We then requested permission to appeal from the Supreme Court, but this was denied in June 2023, bringing our case to an end.

The outcome was disappointing, particularly given that our arguments about the need to assess emissions from burning the gas produced (known as Scope 3 emissions) were later accepted by the Supreme Court in the landmark Finch case. However, the case increased the legal scrutiny of the financiers of the Mozambique LNG project, not just in the UK but around the world.

International opposition

Friends of the Earth England, Wales & Northern Ireland has worked alongside allies in the UK and also sister groups around the world, including Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth France), Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands), Friends of the Earth US and Friends of the Earth Japan to try to stop funding for the project.

We have also been proud to work alongside Friends of the Earth Mozambique, known as Justicia Ambiental! or JA! Our colleagues there, particularly director Anabela Lemos and campaigner Daniel Ribeiro, have fought tirelessly against this project for years, often in dangerous locations and situations. Anabela won a global Right Livelihood award in 2024 for her work opposing gas projects. She has written a blog about the impact of gas projects on Mozambique.

What now?

Although the UK government’s decision to withdraw support is a victory, it doesn’t mean the end of the Mozambique LNG project, so our work doesn’t stop. We will work with allies to get other countries to reconsider their involvement. And we will continue to work closely with JA! and others to try to bring an end to the project as a whole, and to ensure that the UK and others help countries like Mozambique. Helping countries which are on the frontline of the climate crisis by helping them adapt to its impacts and invest in their abundant clean energy resources to bring affordable energy to their people.