Strengthening monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation
This synthesis report identifies a number of methodological challenges and difficulties for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of climate change adaptation (CCA) starting with the difficulty of defining “success” in CCA. The long-term nature of climate change makes the success of adaptation efforts only apparent over time and in retrospect, creating difficulties for current and nearterm assessments of progress. Further, adaptation interventions occur against the background of evolving climate, environmental and developmental baselines – posing challenges for attribution and evaluation – including the relative lack of counterfactual examples for comparative purposes.
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plays an essential role in understanding where to focus investments, what is working and what is not, why this is the case, and how to learn from experience to know how to maximize impact. M&E can (and should) support strategic and effective investments in climate change adaptation (CCA).
The report suggests a number of areas that appear promising for strengthening CCA through more effective M&E. This includes:
- orienting M&E and adaptation interventions to support learning;
- adopting indicators that reflect the processes of adaptation at different scales and provide contextual richness, while allowing for some degree of comparability and aggregation;
- progressing from project-based M&E to M&E and learning (MEL) systems that are linked withdevelopmental efforts; and
- creating environments that enable learning and knowledge management
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