Bhubaneswar: In its continuing efforts to plan, adapt and mitigate climate change, the Climate Change Cell of Government of Odisha today embarked on coding the climate change relevance of the state budget. Odisha has already started implementing the State Action Plan on Climate Change with its own budgetary resources and have also reported on the progress of such activities.
The Additional Chief Secretary Shri Suresh Chandra Mahapatra, while inaugurating the interactive workshop explained the significance of coding the budget. He elaborated that during the process of reporting various activities undertaken by the stakeholder departments, it was felt necessary to develop a methodology for coding the Climate change relevance in the budget and to use this to calculate the total budgeted expenditure of the state in response to Climate change. Such analysis will can be fed into related work that will enable the state to report on the extent to which it is improving the resilience of livelihoods, society and the environment.
The Climate Change Cell, Government of Odisha, aided by technical assistance from Climate Change Innovation Programme (CCIP) has thus taken up the efforts to devise a methodology for coding the climate relevant budgeted expenditure. Ms. Vidya Soundarajan, India Manager for CCIP elaborated how other states are using the climate coding and explained further plans of working with the Climate Change Cell. It is expected that this activity will lead to better climate sensitized planning in future which will consequently reduce the vulnerability of the population of Odisha and also increase the effectiveness of the planned activities by taking into account the changes in climate in the planning phase itself. Mr. Vivek Venkataramani of IFMR LEAD is the lead technical consultant for the project.
Comments are closed.