«The Paris Agreement made clear that climate commitments require public finance, not just policy ambition. Countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) set targets, but targets don’t implement themselves—they require public choices about spending, taxation, subsidies, investment and risk. The budget is where climate goals are tested against real action.
The OECD’s Beyond Green Tagging, and the IMF’s guidance on climate-sensitive PFM, each point to the same gap: governments’ climate commitments often don’t match the fiscal systems used to plan, allocate, and account for public money. Yet global attention and negotiations tend to focus on how much climate financing is needed, where it will come from and whether countries are receiving enough support. Too little attention is paid to whether commitments are visible in the budget decisions that determine what is funded, what is taxed (or not), what is prioritized, and what is tracked—and whether spending is assessed for climate impact. (...)». +.
