Climate Budgeting Guide: Learn how to integrate climate commitments into your municipality’s financial decision making

Climate budgeting is a governance system that incorporates climate commitments and considerations into decision making on policies, actions, and budget allocation. It’s done by integrating climate targets and climate impact evaluation into the financial budgeting process and assigning responsibility for implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting across the municipal government. This way, municipal leaders and staff across departments can share accountability, easing the implementation of climate action plans. Typically approached in phases over iterative budgeting cycles, its scope expands to include the impacts and actions related to climate mitigation, adaptation, and transition risk at the corporate and community levels, and it integrates equity into each of these dimensions.

This Climate Budgeting Guide was created to support Canadian municipalities and local governments in their climate budgeting journey. The guide was created as part of the Municipal Net-Zero Action Research Partnership (N-ZAP) and is based on data collected via six focus groups and 48 interviews with key people who are actively engaged in the climate budgeting process. It identifies key steps in the process, best practices in this emerging area, and resources that can be leveraged to make the implementation of climate budgeting easier, more efficient and more effective. These resources include numerous examples of the varied steps and approaches already in use by Canadian municipalities.

The guide is designed to help municipal leaders and staff from communities at a range of knowledge levels regarding climate budgeting practices, as well as organizations and advocates who are interested in promoting this system.