Climate change public budget tagging: Connections across financial and environmental classification systems
This note argues that existing efforts to monitor climate expenditures can be considerably improved by connecting definitions and classifications systems of climate categories with existing statistical standards and budgetary practices. Current budget-tagging methodologies require expensive, one-off investigations of the climate-relevance of government expenditures, which renders them impractical and inefficient as tools for permanently assessing government climate change policy.
For climate change budget-tagging to make a useful contribution to climate policy and guide fiscal policy, the definitions of climate change expenditures must be consistent with statistical standards currently in use, such as the system of environmental accounts and, above all, the monetary and financial statistical framework developed by the IMF, the principal guide for organizing public expenditure statistics in ministries of finance.