Webinar on Green Budgeting

Annual budget processes are crucial for planning and assessment and serve as an important entry point for mainstreaming climate action and environment-related SDG targets into planning processes. Institutionalizing green budgeting can foster active mindsets within departments and lead to better planning and coordination within the existing fiscal space. Thus, green budgets can be a useful tool to mainstream sustainable development horizontally across departments.

While environmental regulation is the primary responsibility of environmental ministries, much of the implementation of environmental sustainability aspects must be undertaken by other ministries. Environmental sustainability considerations need to be mainstreamed across various schemes and activities of ministries, departments, and sectors. Such mainstreaming will help shape the attitudes and commitments of department officials and other stakeholders.

Green budgeting is a policymaking mechanism that can help systematically map and track sources of funds, outlays, expenditures, and policies. This, in turn, supports coordinated policy design and the identification of periodic and continuous financing needs to achieve green objectives—those relating to climate and environmental dimensions.

Green budgeting can be implemented at both national and state levels. It has the potential to enable innovations within existing schemes and fiscal spaces, facilitating the flow of public funds toward environment-centric activities. Issue-based budgeting processes, such as Child Budgeting (Statement 12 of the Union Budget) and Gender Budgeting (Statement 13 of the Union Budget), already exist in India. However, green budgeting is a relatively new concept, and unlike gender budgeting and child budgeting, there is limited understanding of the green budgeting process. Therefore, there is a need to raise awareness about green budgeting.

With this rationale, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is organizing a Webinar on Green Budgeting on 10th January 2025, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (IST), virtually. TERI colleagues will also discuss the open-access toolkit for green budgeting available on the Green Budgeting Portal.