Impact evaluation and interventions to address climate change: a scoping study

The paper highlights some of the challenges faced when conducting impact evaluations of climate change interventions and discuss how these can be tackled. Section 7.4. specifically examines 'Mainstreaming' adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

The first three sections of the paper provide an extended introduction to climate change and sources of funding for interventions, and may therefore already be familiar to those in the field of climate change. Section 2 summarises current thinking on the science of climate change and its physical impacts. Section 3 provides a background on what is meant by climate change adaptation and mitigation and highlights the sectors most relevant for these interventions. Section 4 provides a brief overview of the main financial resources available through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other multilateral and bilateral sources. The remaining sections discuss impact evaluation in relation to climate change interventions. Section 5 provides a brief introduction to IE, before looking at how it has been applied to climate change and related environmental interventions in developing countries to date, followed by a discussion of the limits and opportunities to applying rigorous IE to climate change interventions. The sixth and seventh sections focus on some of the key areas relevant for adaptation and mitigation interventions, respectively, and suggest ways in which IEs could be implemented, using evaluations in other policy fields as examples. The final section concludes.