Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation

At a Glance

Industry

Government/Public Administration

Project Types

Goals/Targets, Sustainability and Energy Management Strategy

Year

2022

Location

Mumbai, Maharashtra

Summary

Madhur Manve conducted a climate budget assessment (CBA) for BMC’s FY 2022-23 budget and estimated historical GHG emissions to develop a climate budgeting framework for the city.

Goals

Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP) aims to make Mumbai net-zero by 2050. A system needs to be put in place that helps BMC to integrate climate action into its functions and long-term strategy for successful MCAP implementation. To this purpose, Madhur performed CBA to determine what percentage of BMC's current budget affects or is affected by climate change, allowing them to allocate funds to departments and sectors that are both climate relevant and climate sensitive.

Solutions

Madhur arrived at the following solutions after his assessment:

  1. Creation of a CBA Framework: This methodology can be used to confirm the financial allocation of climate-relevant activities across departments as well as identified sectors of the MCAP in BMC’s budget. The relevance and sensitivity analysis that follows maps out the degree to which it is directly and indirectly impacted by climate change and the necessity of climate proofing or climate benefit retention of those activities/actions.

  2. Integrating climate budgeting into the BMC’s budget process: The planning for the effects of climate change on budgets can become an ex-ante rather than ex-post activity. The Account head of all department should include a column specifying whether or not a planned action is climate relevant and in line with an MCAP priority action track, when submitting their initial budget request to the finance team in October for the upcoming fiscal year. Guidance on climate budgeting would be useful to include in BMC’s budgetary guidance which is shared with departments before they prepare their departmental budget for the following year.  Capacity building workshops for departments can be conducted to undertake CBA.

Historical GHG emissions of the city: A citywide GHG inventory forms a crucial component of any climate action strategy, as it identifies the sources and sinks of GHGs. The historical GHG emission inventory for the financial period 2015-2020 for Mumbai includes an analysis of the energy, transport and waste sectors within the city limits that release GHGs into the atmosphere. The GHG emission inventory exercise can be projected further to estimate the potential emission reductions from climate-relevant and sensitive budgetary actions done in accordance with the MCAP.

Potential Impact

BMC’s current (FY2022-23) was easier to comprehend and delineate climate relevant activities with the help of CBA. For FY 2022-23, climate-related activities received approximately 16% of the BMC budget. This percentage should be slowly increased in succeeding budget cycles, and BMC can target 20% for the next fiscal year. Urban floods and Water Resource Management sectors of MCAP receive the largest funding, whereas Urban Greening and Biodiversity and Sustainable Waste Management need immediate budgeting and prioritising.

The incorporation of climate budgeting into the annual budgeting process of the BMC would mainstream climate thinking and prioritize climate projects into both their day-to-day operations and their long-term goals and objectives. This can be leveraged as a governance tool to ensure better coordinated outcomes and also ensures financial resources are available to implement MCAP. The GHG emission inventory can be used with the climate budget to further prioritize the actions and track, evaluate and report progress of MCAP implementation. CBA as a tool will provide the strategic groundwork to include climate resilience, climate proofing, and climate actions perspective in budget.

 

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