Title : Financing climate change adaptation and its devolution through national budget in Tanzania.
Abstract:
Unprecedented rate of changing climate has caused major damages to Earth’s life-support systems. Therefore, the need for transitions toward sustainability by financing climate adaptation has been extensively advocated. In Tanzania, . The international development assistance is registered by OECD, and tagged by donors, and finance from nationally generated revenue is mainstreamed in the national budget while its proportion is unknown. This paper analyzes climate change adaptation relevance of the national budget (from 2014 to 2022), using the same methodology applied in a previous study by Yanda et al., (2013). The study further assesses financial devolution of climate change adaptation financed to local governments. Using positivity research approach, this study adopted mixed design where quantitative data was extracted from Tanzania national budget (2014/15-2021/22) while qualitative data was collected from key informants. Quantitative data was analyzed using excel spreadsheet to find amount of financial allocation, allocation trends and level of devolution for climate change adaptation in the national budget while qualitative data was analyzed by QSR Nvivo software where information from the field was grouped in themes to represent key focus of the research objectives to generate key findings, and then the grouped findings were presented to answer the key research questions.
The study shows that US$ 1.7 bil was allocated for climate change adaption in the national budget, off which US$ 1.2 bil was from international sources and US$ 0.5 billion from domestic sources from 2014/15 to 2021/22. Findings show increased trend in financial allocation in the national budget from US$ 565 million in 2012/13 reported by Yanda et al., (2013) to US$ 1.7 billion in 2022. The study finds high proportion of climate adaptation finance was used in ministries in crosscutting, energy, transport and water sectors than in local governments. Hence, the local governments lack discretion over climate change adaptation finance as only 5% of climate change adaptation projects channeled their finance trough local government authorities, 33% of the projects encouraged community participation and 16% of the projects had their financial allocation under local government’s votes. The study concludes by urging the national budget to increase financial allocation and tag projects to improve financial tracking in climate change adaptation.
Keywords: Climate change finance, Tracking adaptation finance, Adaptation projects, Financial devolution.
