Your Voice Belongs in the Climate Budget

Climate change is no longer a distant threat. It is a brutal reality in the Philippines. Ranked among the most climate-vulnerable countries globally, our country faces intensifying typhoons, sea-level rise, droughts, and heat stress that threaten lives, livelihoods, and long-term development. These risks are already here, reshaping lives across every region of the country, documented in the media and studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and WorldRiskIndex, and felt by millions of ordinary Filipinos every single day. 

To address this issue, we talk a lot about climate action. But before we get to act,  there are a few questions we need to start asking louder:

do we have resources to act, and if yes, and where does all this money go?

From Climate Policies to Budgets

Over the last two decades, the Philippines has built a real policy foundation for climate action. The Climate Change Act of 2009 institutionalized climate governance, creating the Climate Change Commission and mandating the integration of climate change into development planning. The National Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAP) 2011–2028 outlines national priorities across sectors such as agriculture, water, and infrastructure. Climate goals are embedded in the Philippine Development Plan 2023–2028.

These represent years of advocacy, legislation, and institutional work by champions within and outside of government. But if there is anything that my more than a decade of experience in the public financial management space has taught me, it is that policies only matter if resources follow. A commitment written into policy but left unfunded is just words. The real test of whether the government is serious about climate is found not in what it says, but in what it spends.

It is in the public budget where climate commitments are tested and where we see whether governments are truly investing in solutions, or merely articulating ambitions. And right now, those budget conversations are happening without enough of us in the room.

There Is Already a System and It Needs Your Eyes on It

The government has created a tool called Climate Change Expenditure Tagging (CCET), developed by the Department of Budget and Management and the Climate Change Commission. CCET allows government agencies and local governments to identify and track climate-related spending, making it possible to see, at least on paper, where public money is going.

This is a concrete policy milestone. However, there still remain several critical gaps. The data now exists and is disclosed, but not in ways people can easily understand. There are also no established channels for communities to formally respond to what the numbers reveal. Reporting remains largely focused on budget allocations and investment trends. Comprehensive, public-facing reports on the implementation, performance, and outcomes of climate-tagged expenditures are still limited. 

World Bank analyses have also flagged persistent problems in CCET implementation: inconsistent tagging, weak links between spending and outcomes, and limited local capacity. Money is being allocated, but we cannot always tell if it is reaching the right places or making a real difference.

Transparency without access, without plain language, and without a real mechanism for public participation is incomplete. That is the gap civil society and young people can help close: by demanding not just that the data be published, but that it be made genuinely usable, and that citizens have a real say in what happens next and how it happens. 

Why the Climate Budget Fight is Worth Showing Up For

Engaging in climate budgeting is not just bureaucratic participation. It is a form of climate action.

We have seen what happens when citizens are kept out of the room. The Philippines' flood control corruption scandal, where up to ₱118.5 billion in flood control funding may have been lost to corruption in just two years, is a devastating reminder of what unchecked public spending looks like. It has been unsettling to read reports of kickbacks leaving a trail of ghost projects, with only 30-40% of funds for actual construction of projects that push through. Communities that had called for audits of these projects watched as the corruption they feared became the floods that reached their doorsteps.

A Filipino faces rising floodwaters on November 4 in her village of Cotcot, Liloan, in the Philippines' Cebu province. Virnalyn Catipay

It raises a difficult but necessary question. Could more of this have been prevented if civil society had been more meaningfully engaged in the formulation and implementation of climate expenditures?

When citizens, watchdog groups, and local communities are able to scrutinize budgets early, track spending in real time, and demand accountability, warning signs are harder to ignore and harder to conceal.

A review of the 10-year CCET and the General Appropriations Act (GAA) data reveals obvious red flags that could have been monitored better. Climate-tagged expenditures grew sixfold in a decade, culminating in a jarring 152.7 percent spike in 2025 alone. Nearly 90 percent of that budget was concentrated in a single agency, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), the same agency at the center of the flood control controversy.

Source: Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing 2017-2026, Department of Budget and Management

This is precisely where public participation matters most. Engagement is not only about having a voice, but about creating early warning systems for governance risks. When civil society and communities are part of budget formulation and implementation, they can question sudden spikes, flag concentration of funds, and push for greater scrutiny before problems escalate.

The Data Is Public But The Decisions Are Not

Wider entry points for participation already exist. Local and regional development councils provide spaces to engage at the subnational level. The Climate Change Act itself requires stakeholder participation in climate policy and planning. National and local climate planning processes are supposed to be inclusive, and in many cases, they are.

But there is a crucial distinction we need to clarify: climate policies may be open to public input, but climate budgets are not there yet.

You can show up to a consultation on the National Climate Change Action Plan. But when it comes to a more dedicated consultation on climate expenditure, that conversation still happens behind closed doors. I could not find any evidence that shows that the national government has an open, institutionalized mechanism for citizens to meaningfully weigh in on climate budget decisions at the national level. The numbers are published, yes. But publishing numbers is not the same as inviting people to shape them.

This matters enormously. Because the real decisions, the ones that determine whether flood-prone communities get protection, whether farmers get support, whether vulnerable regions get resources are made in the budget. And right now, the people who bear the greatest cost of climate change–low-income households, women, indigenous peoples, and young people—are largely absent from those decisions.

This is also an accountability issue. When decisions on large-scale investments such as flood control are made without meaningful public scrutiny, the risks translate into wasted resources, failed infrastructure, and lives put in danger. Stronger public participation in climate budgeting can act as a safeguard, creating additional layers of oversight that help detect irregularities early, question unusual allocations, and ensure that funds are used for their intended purpose. If communities, civil society, and watchdog groups were more systematically engaged in both the formulation and implementation of climate expenditures, there is a real possibility that cases like the flood control scandal could have been flagged earlier, challenged more forcefully, and potentially prevented.

The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) principles enshrine participation as a crucial element to making policy more effective, more equitable, and more trusted. It is not a nice-to-have. It is a condition for climate budgeting that actually works.

So the question is not whether participation matters. The question is whether we are willing to push for it and demand that the climate budget, not just the policy, becomes a space where our voices count.

From Tracking to Transformation, Together

The Philippines has come a long way. Climate budgeting is no longer a concept borrowed from international frameworks. It is embedded in government systems, reflected in growing budget allocations, and increasingly visible in public reporting.

But the work is far from done. Growing allocations mean little if the money is mislabeled, misused, or simply invisible to the communities it is supposed to protect. As climate risks intensify, we need to move beyond simply tracking spending. We need public finance systems that deliver real resilience, real equity, accountability and a future worth inheriting–and that requires more than technocrats in budget offices. It requires communities, civil society organizations, and young people who understand what is at stake and are ready to engage.

Climate action is not just about what governments plan. It is about what governments fund. And what governments fund can be shaped by advocacy, by participation, by showing up and refusing to let these conversations happen without us.

Every peso in the climate budget is a decision about whose future gets protected. Make sure yours is one of them.