By Mukalazi Deus, Board Chair UBUNTALISM GLOBAL and National Coordinator MUNGAANO INITIATIVE FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE. mubirudeus22@gmail.com
As Uganda unveiled its Shs72.1 trillion National Budget for the 2025/26 financial year, hopes were high that climate change would finally command the urgency it deserves. Unfortunately, despite several commendable measures, the budget once again underperforms in one of the most critical areas of our national future: climate responsiveness.
According to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative 2021, Uganda ranks 13th in climate change vulnerability globally and 160th in preparedness. The Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) document (which is a 5-year commitment to the United Nations on climate adaptation and mitigation measures), notes that climate change is impacting and is projected to impact physical infrastructure, food security, water resources, agriculture, energy, health, and ecosystems. An assessment of the economic impacts of climate change in Uganda indicated that adaptation inaction could result in annual costs rising in the range of $3.2–5.9 billion within a decade.
The 2025/26 budget allocates just over Shs520 billion to environment, climate, and natural resource management—less than 1% of the total budget. Meanwhile, sectors like security and infrastructure receive over Shs10 trillion and Shs6 trillion, respectively. While these are important, such an imbalance raises a serious policy question: how can we build roads, only to watch them wash away in floods we failed to prepare for?
Uganda’s NDC estimate a need for over $28 billion (Shs105 trillion) by 2030 to implement climate mitigation and adaptation. The same document recognizes that there is limited utilization of the climate change financing windows and more efforts are needed to secure funding facilities like the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Global Environment Facility (GEF). With Government of Uganda committing to mobilize only 15% of the funds required resources to implement the $28 billion adaptation and mitigation plan, a lot of effort is needed to attract the 85% deficit needed. A national budget would be the best way to demonstrate how this shall be done. A demonstration of how the budget responds to climate change commitments and how it is aligned to the NDC would establish a good case for attracting these available resources. However, the budget reveals no clear strategy to unlock international climate finance or attract private green investment.
Worse still, there is no climate budget tagging mechanism. This means the government cannot even accurately track how much of the budget addresses climate priorities. Whereas the National Development Plan IV is littered with a lot of reference to climate change goals and targets, and in spite of the existence of an elaborate National Determined Contribution, the budget makes no effort to integrate this and clearly show how the allocations shall be used to achieve these climate change adaptation and mitigation goals. The budget instead seems to reduce climate change to climate emergency and disaster preparedness with the Minister only making an allocation under what is referred to as “climate change” yet climate change is a cross-cutting issue that affects and is affected by almost all sectors. Without clear budget tagging to climate change goals, planning is guesswork, and accountability becomes impossible.
The 2025/26 Budget seems another missed opportunity for Uganda to come out with Climate Change Responsive Budget but it is not an irreversible one. Here’s what must change:
- Scale Up Climate Investment: Uganda should aim to allocate at least 3–5% of its national budget to climate-related sectors, especially adaptation in agriculture, water management, urban planning, and disaster preparedness.
- Institutionalize Climate Budgeting: Although ministries are required to integrate climate in planning and budgets, mechanisms for tagging climate-relevant expenditures remain underdeveloped and inconsistent. The Ministry of Finance must adopt climate budget tagging, ensuring every project is assessed for climate impact. Climate risks must become a core part of cost-benefit analyses.
- Amend the Climate Change Act and the Public Finance Management Act to provide for a thorough assessment of the budget by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Climate Change: The current requirement of certificate of compliance by the NPA needs to be checked by the legislature. There is need for all sectors to make a deliberate effort to highlight how their budget proposals shall enable Uganda to achieve its commitments under the NDC and NDP IV. Climate Change issues seem to get lost through the vetting process and this stage shall help eliminate this.
- Leverage International Finance: The government should prioritize accessing funds from the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and bilateral sources. But these require readiness and transparency—qualities currently lacking.
- Strengthen Capacity of technocrats to undertake Climate Responsive Budgeting: It’s evident that there is a capacity gap on the side of technocrats both at the national and local government level.There is need to invest in building the capacity of these technocrats through on job trainings.
Uganda’s 2025/26 Budget reveals nascent but insufficient capacity for climate-responsive budgeting. Despite strong policy intentions, institutional, technical, and financial constraints significantly hinder Uganda’s ability to align its fiscal policy with its climate commitments. Strategic reforms in Public Finance Management laws, institutional coordination, and domestic resource mobilization are urgently needed to close the Climate Responsive Budgeting gap.
