Critical Engagement: Improving Climate Budgeting During Covid-19 by People, Planet and Public Finance

In “Getting Money to Where It Matters: Ensuring Funds for Climate Action Reach Those Who Need It Most” — the third podcast in the joint IIED and International Budget Partnership ‘People, Planet and Public Finance' series — IIED researcher Emilie Beauchamp and Bara Gueye, former director of IED Afrique in Senegal, discuss a new mechanism for getting public money that is intended for use in addressing climate change to the local level; a mechanism that accounts for the need to reduce financial risk and ensure accountability.

There’s been a lot of talk about how much international and national finance is being mobilized to address the climate crisis, but how much are people and families spending to address climate impacts? An important new study from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) begins to shed some light on this largely unanswered question. Join us for this timely discussion with Paul Steele from IIED and Shaikh Eskander from Kingston University London, the authors of “Bearing the climate burden: how households in Bangladesh are spending too much” and learn about their disturbing findings on what poor rural households in Bangladesh are spending of their own money to deal with climate catastrophe, how these families’ future prospects and security are being hurt, and what governments and the international community should do.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, degradation of natural systems are the crises threatening the economic and social systems that form the core of society. Failure to halt these crises threatens to increase poverty and inequality and to undermine the vision of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for a sustainable, just and resilient world. The ways that governments raise and spend public money will have a huge impact on addressing climate breakdown and other environmental degradation. Murray Petrie of the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency joins host Delaine McCollough to discuss how countries can “green” their budgets and aggressively respond to the impacts on people and communities.