The Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Amílcar Tivane, said this Thursday, 30 May, that the country spends around 1.5% of public money every year to deal with the adverse impacts of natural disasters.
The minister was speaking in Maputo at a panel on infrastructure and green cities at the Mozambique-UK Business Forum, which is being held under the slogan ‘Economic Development through Investment, Trade and Industrialisation’.
‘Mozambique is a country prone to shocks. Just to give you an idea, we practically devote 1.5 per cent of public money every year to dealing with the adverse impact of natural disasters,’ said Tivane.
The deputy minister pointed to the capacity of municipalities to respond as one of the solutions to the problem. ‘The basic issue is to ensure that state institutions and decentralised governance bodies, including municipalities, have the capacity, in the context of designing their investment plans, to introduce metrics to be able to scale the magnitude of interventions and also to facilitate the process of mobilising climate-related resources,’ said Amílcar Tivane.
He said that in 2022, a financing unit was set up at the Ministry of Economy and Finance with ‘the purpose of being the government’s voice in the context of initiatives that aim to capitalise on this funding, but also to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge, so that institutions can introduce this dimension into their strategic plans and beyond’.
He also spoke about strengthening Mozambique’s capacity in the carbon markets, emphasising that the government is committed to seeking international climate funds.
According to the World Risk Report 2022, Mozambique is the seventh most vulnerable country in the world to natural disasters, with a risk of 34.37 per cent and vulnerability of 65.28 per cent.