Announcements
Announcements
Despite growing support for climate adaptation action, it remains difficult to track and demonstrate progress, including towards the global goal on adaptation. A prevailing lack of rigour in adaptation reporting and evaluation must be addressed immediately.
The UNFCCC global stocktake tracks progress towards achieving the three global goals of the Paris Agreement. The global goal on adaptation is to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change. Attempts at demonstrating progress towards this imprecisely worded goal have challenges, however.
Evaluating adaptation interventions in developing countries could be an important contribution to the global stocktake, which includes a review of the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation action and support. However, lack of reporting and evaluation rigour hinders the assessment of adaptation effectiveness.
The authors of this study identified four challenges related to the availability and quality of evidence for assessing adaptation progress, and propose solutions.
Summary of adaptation evaluation challenges and solutions
| Evaluation focus | Adaptation outputs and outcomes | Impact of adaptation interventions | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Constraint | Availability of evidence | Quality of evidence | Availability of evidence | Quality of evidence |
| Challenge | Data on intervention outputs and outcomes are not easily accessible or publicly available | Reporting of adaptation intervention outputs and outcomes is incomplete and inconsistent | Rigorous independent impact evaluations of adaptation interventions are few and far between | Process, not progress is often measured and evaluated in adaptation |
| Solution | The adaptation community (policymakers, funders, practitioners, researchers) creates a free, comprehensive and easy-to-use global database of adaptation interventions | The adaptation community uses agreed indicators consistently to evaluate and report adaptation outcomes at intervention level | Funders and implementers invest in rigorous monitoring and evaluation of adaptation interventions | Adaptation evaluators learn from development research and practice and build on existing approaches to impact evaluation |
Two people in an agricultural field monitoring edge plants. British Columbia, Canada. Photo: Climate Visuals.
Team Leader: International Climate Risk and Adaptation; Senior Research Fellow
SEI Headquarters
Project / SEI research project for the UK Department for International Development examines the effectiveness of climate aid funding.
Journal article / How much progress has been made on adapting to climate change? Find out from this global systematic review of current evidence.
Past event / Join us to discuss new evidence on ten transboundary climate risks in Adaptation Without Borders' first flagship report.
SEI brief / This brief from SEI, IDDRI and ODI finds that a transboundary view of climate risk creates opportunities for international cooperation on adaptation.
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