Climate fund pledges rise to $9.3bn British ministers have come under fire for pledging up to £720m in aid to help poor countries deal with climate change after critics said the money would be better spent at home. The $1.1bn UK contribution was one of several announced in Berlin on Thursday for a UN fund that developing countries say is vital for securing a global agreement on tackling climate change in Paris at the end of next year. The new pledges mean up to $9.3bn has now been committed by 21 countries including the US, Japan, Germany and France for the South Korea-based Green Climate Fund. This represents an "unmistaken sign of trust-building," said the fund's executive director, Hela Cheikhrouhou. The money will be used to trigger more private and public investment in projects such as solar plants and flood defences in poor countries. Some climate change campaigners say the $9.3bn falls far short of what needs to be raised, but the criticism provoked by the British pledge underlines the political pressures surrounding the thorny issue of international climate financing. British Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leigh, said the UK was not spending enough at home to prevent a repeat of the "appalling" floods that devastated villages in the southwest of the country last year. "We have to look at the interests of the taxpayer and our own people," he told the BBC. We're still not spending enough on flood alleviation. First of all we need to spend the money here. UK climate and energy secretary, Ed Davey, defended the pledge, saying the UK had a "moral duty to act." "The idea we should be isolationist Little Englanders is absolute nonsense," he said. People recognise that we live in a global economy where when something happens in another part of the world it can impact on our lives here. Annual global expenditure on renewable power, energy efficiency and other measures to ward off the impact of climate change fell around 8 per cent to $331bn in 2013, according to a study published on Thursday by the Climate Policy Initiative, an analysis group. This was partly because the cost of solar panels and other forms of renewable energy had fallen, the report said. But it is still well below the $790bn the International Energy Agency has estimated will need to be spent on systems such as wind farms and solar plants each year by 2020 if the world is to avoid risky levels of climate change. The UK is committing to fund 12 per cent of the Green Climate Fund, up to a maximum of £720m. The money will come from existing funds earmarked for international climate work by the UK, which has a commitment to deliver 0.7 per cent of gross national income for overseas development assistance. Germany and France have also each pledged $1bn to the fund, while the US has said it will put in $3bn and Japan has promised $1.5bn. The size of the fund is being closely watched as officials from more than 190 countries prepare for the latest round of UN climate negotiations in Lima, Peru, in December. This is the last major meeting before leaders are due to finalise a global climate deal in Paris in December 2015 that will in effect replace the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the world's only treaty requiring countries to lower their emissions of carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. The new deal, if it is finalised, will take effect from 2020 and it is still unclear if it will end up lowering emissions enough to prevent global temperatures rising more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times, a threshold countries have agreed should not be breached. Temperatures have already climbed 0.8C. Hopes of a successful deal were bolstered last week when the US and China jointly announced their plans to curb carbon emissions more than a year out from the Paris meeting, something the world's two biggest emitters have failed to do in the past. But developing countries are still nervous about the shape of the deal, and how much money wealthy nations will deliver to help them deal with a problem largely created by the earlier industrialisation in richer nations. Developed countries pledged nearly four years ago they would try to deliver $100bn a year by 2020 from public and private sources to help developing countries limit and adapt to climate change.