Odisha Becomes First State To Introduce Climate Budget

Bhubaneswar: While presenting the State budget 2020-21 in Odisha Assembly on Tuesday, Finance Minister Niranjan Pujari also introduced the Climate Budget which aims to keep track of the government expenditure made for climate change or to support mitigation and adaption actions to address climate change.

The Finance minister said, “We propose to introduce a document on Climate Budget to provide a brief account of tracking climate public expenditure. Odisha is the first State in the country to bring out such disclosure.”

According to sources, the State government has proposed the Climate budget to outline the current climate change relevance and sensitivity of public expenditure in the sector. With this, the government focuses on to improve the climate resilience and mitigation outcomes. It will also help the government to decide whether to redesign or safeguard the existing projects from the climate change impacts, the Climate Budget document read.

The Finance minister also announced two separate disclosure documents for Gender Budget and Child Budget with a focus on the empowerment of women as well as rights and holistic development of children.

Pujari also stated that the State government with support from UNICEF has also brought out a Nutrition Budget statement. As nutrition for children is a global challenge, the State government aims to cover information and analysis on all nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive schemes.

Odisha government today introduced a paperless budget with an aim to save trees.

In his tweet, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik stated, “Committed to build a green & sustainable future, Odisha has saved around 1000 big trees by switching over to paperless budgeting in 2020-21 fiscal. Digital methods reduced printing of at least 75 lakh pages, ultimately saving hundreds of trees.”

https://twitter.com/Naveen_Odisha/status/1229286624451678209