Uganda continues to experience severe weather conditions that damage key infrastructure, threaten food security, and lead to loss of lives and livelihoods in extreme cases.
The 2024 National Population Census Report indicated that 38.8 percent of parishes reported floods, 63.5 percent drought, and 12.2 percent reported landslides. The National Development Plan IV has sufficiently captured the climate change threat and established programme-tied interventions aimed at adaptation and mitigation. This article examines the FY2026/7 proposed budget’s compliance to climate change interventions set out in NPV IV.
According to the May 2025 Climate Change Budget Compliance Assessment Report, agro industrialisation remains one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse emissions through land clearance and waste release. Further, the programme is highly vulnerable to prolonged dry spells, erratic rains, and floods.
Despite its vulnerability to climate change effects, the programme recorded a slight improvement in compliance rating from 32.6 percent in FY 2024/25 to 37.1 percent in FY 2025/26 despite an expansion in climate-related indicators under NDP IV. The low scores were attributed to poor institutionalisation of climate actions, with 44 percent of output indicators not planned for and 23 percent scaled down.
The FY2026/27 Budget Framework Paper (BFP) puts emphasis on micro-scale irrigation across all local governments, operationalisation of demonstration sites, and development of 46 climate-smart agriculture technologies. Additional interventions include training of farmers and scientists, dissemination of rainfall forecasts, and establishment of demonstration gardens. These actions reflect progress in areas that were previously under-planned, particularly irrigation and climate-smart agriculture.
Despite this progress, climate actions remain concentrated at the agricultural production level, with limited coverage of the full agro-industrial value chain, leaving overall compliance low and fragmented. Climate risk management tools such as agricultural insurance, interventions on carbon farming or mitigation strategies still lack a strong strategy for upscaling. Interventions such as soil management technologies, livestock adaptation measures, and fisheries-related actions, are still absent.
Like agro-industrilisation, the manufacturing programme remains one of the biggest contributors to emissions through steel and cement industries. However, its compliance declined to 10 percent in FY2025/26 from 34 percent in FY2024/25, largely due to non-prioritisation of climate-related outputs and lack of resource allocation to critical indicators.
To overcome these gaps, the FY2026/27 BFP introduces interventions aimed at cleaner production, adoption of innovative technologies, and support for green financing. It also includes technical guidance for industries to comply with environmental management standards, directly addressing gaps previously identified in compliance assessments.
However, the targets still need to be clearer with measurement systems, budget allocations and strong enforcement. Otherwise, critical gaps may persist due to the absence of data systems for tracking emissions, support for adoption of green technologies at scale, and structured financing mechanisms that enable manufacturing plants to adopt.
Lastly, compliance of the Natural Resources, Environment, Climate Change, Land and Water Management programme declined from 56.1 percent FY 2024/25 to 53 percent in FY2025/26. These levels are unsatisfactory given the magnitude of the climate threat. To address this, the BFP FY2026/27’s proposes installation and maintenance of meteorological infrastructure, expansion of early warning systems, and last-mile dissemination of weather information, gaps that were identified in previous compliance reports. It further commits continued investment in ecosystem restoration, including 50,000 hectares of degraded landscapes, 640 hectares of ecosystems, and 400 km of wetland demarcation, alongside livelihood support to affected households.
In addition, new institutional actions such as the Digital Carbon Register and preparation of Nationally Determined Contribution 3.0 indicate progress in climate reporting and carbon management. However, support to households remains limited relative to need, and biodiversity interventions such as Ramsar site management and ecotourism are not reflected in the budget. There is also no clear evidence that target deviations and inconsistencies between planning and budgeting have been resolved. Coordination across Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) remains weak.
Therefore, climate change compliance remains insufficiently integrated into budgeting, a trend that does not reflect the magnitude of the threat. The climate finance unit should explore possibilities of expanding financing through concessional funds and stronger public-private partnerships to close the gap. The Ministry of Water and Environment should revisit and reassign the climate action goals that have since been affected by the Rationalisation of Public Expenditure (RAPEX), which merged entities.
A forward-looking budget should treat climate change resilience as a core component of macroeconomic stability and long-term growth because every shilling spent on adaptation and mitigation today saves more than double in hazardous emergencies in future.
The author is a research associate at Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC)
EPRC featured photo: The aftermath of River Nyamwamba overflows that have destroyed homes, taken lives and displaced the residents of Kasese district
