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.
If climate goals are not visible in those decisions, they risk remaining separate from the fiscal systems that shape government action.
Climate budgeting should make climate commitments traceable through the budget cycle, from policy ambition to spending decisions to implementation and results.
Where does Green Budgeting Stand in OBS 2025?
This year’s Open Budget Survey (OBS) results include supplementary questions on climate budgeting across 82 countries. The findings show that green budgeting tools are increasingly present across public financial management systems, but adoption is uneven. While climate tagging is the most common practice, there is less adoption of more robust tools to assess whether spending is reducing emissions, supporting adaptation, delivering value for money or reaching affected communities.
Source: International Budget Partnership, Open Budget Survey 2025
Note: This analysis was conducted using the data from General Question 3, with researchers’ responses further categorized to identify common themes and patterns.
Even when tools exist, climate expenditure is rarely tracked through implementation, performance reviews seldom include environmental outcomes, and data sits fragmented across agencies.
Adopting these tools is the first step—the harder task is connecting them so they inform decisions, appear in public budget documents and let people assess whether climate spending is producing results.
This challenge becomes clearest when internal tools are not reflected in public disclosure. A separate OBS indicator asks whether governments make climate-related spending visible in their Executive Budget Proposal—the moment fiscal choices become public. Only 13 countries do. More telling, 18 countries with green budget tagging in place do not present climate-related impacts or climate-related budget displays in their budget proposals. In other words, they may have the tools to track climate-related spending, but they are not making that connection visible to citizens, media, legislators, or civil society in the document that matters most for accountability. This gap hits civil society hardest: the actors closest to communities facing climate impacts and often best placed to assess whether public commitments are producing results.