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Introduction

Agriculture contributes to about one third of Nepal’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employs about two-thirds of the population directly or indirectly. Agriculture being highly vulnerable to climate change, experiences far-reaching impacts with implications on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1: Food security, Nutrition and Hunger and other SDGs. Since these impacts directly affect the livelihoods of a large number of people depending upon agriculture, it is important to integrate climate change in agriculture plans at all levels of government—local, provincial and federal.

The Government of Nepal (GoN) has recently made various efforts to integrate climate change in planning and budgeting across the sectors in order to make development programs climate responsive. Several guidelines have been formulated and policy reforms introduced to help the ministries in prioritization, budget allocation and expenditure tracking to support their climate goals.

To this end the GoN has recently endorsed a Climate Change Financing Framework1 (CCFF) and prepared a roadmap to guide mainstreaming climate actions into development plans and budgets and improve accountability and reporting on the effectiveness of climate investments.
The roadmap further provides guidance to the sectoral ministries in SDG implementation and localization by ensuring that climate actions are well integrated into SDGbased plans and monitoring frameworks at all levels.

This policy brief examines impacts of climate change on agriculture productivity and opportunities to improve agriculture sector planning and budgeting based on CCFF recommendations and its implementation at sub-national levels under federal governance structure. This note also discusses the interlinkages between CCFF and SDG implementation, puts forward why policy reforms are critical to national interest.