Manila: The government has introduced a scheme to identify spending for climate change response in the national budget.
Through a new tagging initiative that will be first used in the 2015 budget, policymakers and the general public would be able to easily identify and keep track of public budget funding for climate change response — thus promoting greater transparency and prioritisation in government spending, officials said. The new tagging scheme was made possible through assistance from Australia and World Bank who provided funds for this particular endeavour.
According to budget secretary Florencio Abad the tagging exercise makes climate change spending so much more transparent and accountable. “More important, however, is what the process means for our climate change management programme in the long term. Tagging lets us access timely information that will be useful when agencies plan, implement, and monitor their climate change management programmes. Altogether, we’re taking a very strategic approach to government spending so that our climate change initiatives are properly supported,” he said.
Abad was among the speakers during the presentation of the lessons and recommendations from the progress report titled Mobilising the Budget for Climate Change Response in the Philippines prepared by the climate change commission (CCC), Department of Budget and Management, (DBM) and the World Bank.
The budget tagging system had been the result of Philippines experience on climate change, including that from Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) that caused massive devastation in Central Philippines.
Using common guidelines issued by the department of budget and management and the climate change commission, 53 national government agencies have tagged over five per cent of the total 2015 national budget submissions for climate change expenditures amounting to P136.3 billion (Dh11.17 billion).
About 98 per cent of these proposed spending is directed towards climate change adaptation, including flood control, reforestation, sector-specific research and development on climate change, and disaster risk reduction.
If approved by Congress, this figure would continue the trend of rising climate change spending, which had reached two per cent of the national budget in 2012 for climate-focused departments.
Earlier, EU commissioner for international cooperation, humanitarian aid & crisis response, Kristalina Georgieva, said more needs to be done if Asia is to overcome challenges posed by natural calamities and climate change. “Over the last three decades, the cost of natural disasters have quadrupled. In three of the last four years, they have exceeded $200 billion (Dh734 billion) so we now expecting that the trend will continue to go up,” Georgieva said during the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) on disaster risk reduction and management last June in Manila.
Georgieva said The Philippines could defeat the effects of climate change if the government and people “build preparedness in everything we do.”
“We spend 96 per cent to respond. Yes it is important to rebuild, to help people get back on their feet, but it is even more important to prevent them from falling down to begin with,” she said adding that over the last three decades, the cost of natural disasters have quadrupled.
The Philippines, being a country located close to the equator, is prone to the effects of climate change.
