Implementing Climate Budgeting in Buenos Aires: Leveraging AI Tools for Success

This Capstone project supported the City of Buenos Aires (CABA) in advancing from climate budgeting recommendations to actual implementation. CABA has ambitious climate commitments under its Climate Action Plan 2050 and, as a member of the C40 network, faces growing pressure to embed climate objectives into its budget governance structure. Yet the city still lacks a formal, institutionalized system for tracking how its municipal budget allocates resources toward those goals. Building on a prior SIPA Capstone workshop engagement, the work represented the next phase of a multi-year effort to help CABA move from pilot exercises to a repeatable, defensible climate budgeting process.

The engagement focused on three parallel workstreams: a comparative analysis of how peer cities approach climate budgeting, a preliminary keyword-based tagging exercise conducted in R against the city’s FY2025 budget, and the development of an AI-assisted classification tool that applies proportional weighting to produce a defensible, reproducible climate share estimate. The final production methodology applied the OECD Rio Marker framework to CABA’s executed 2025 budget, classifying 45,444 budget lines across 118 unique programs and assigning proportional climate weights for direct action and enabling co-benefit spending. After four iterative versions designed to eliminate interpretive variance, the final result estimated climate-related expenditure at 6.46% of total executed spending, or approximately ARS 930 billion. This figure is designed as a conservative lower bound that can withstand audit scrutiny.

Primary deliverables included a six-sheet Excel workbook, a self-contained interactive HTML dashboard, a reusable methodology package, and phased recommendations for validation, scaling, and institutionalization. Together, these outputs provided CABA with a practical starting point for embedding climate budgeting into its regular budget processes and strengthening alignment between climate commitments and public expenditure.