Evaluating the progress made in climate change adaptation using indicators of resilience, Part I: Introduction

Part 1: Introduction: The concept of adaptation – a broad domain with evaluation challenges

Over the past decade, development programmes have increased their focus on how poor countries and populations can adapt to a changing climate. International climate finance supports specific adaptation actions but also has a strong focus on building the capacity of developing countries to adapt to climate change and its impacts. Outside the narrow donor-driven programme context, national governments and local authorities are also developing their own climate change adaptation strategies and policies.

According to the climatefundsupdate.org website, donors have pledged around $35 billion[1] to international climate funds intended to support developing countries in addressing climate change through a combination of mitigation and adaptation strategies, policies and programmes.

In Copenhagen in 2009, an agreement was reached that this figure should rise to $100 billion a year by 2020, with about half of this sum being spent on adaptation.

However, the money pledged to international climate funds represents only a fraction of spending on climate change. According to the Climate Policy Initiative, the totality of climate finance was $331 in 2013. Of this, 58% ($193 billion) was provided by the private sector, and 42% ($137 billion) by the public sector[2]. The vast majority of this money has gone to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The World Bank estimates that the costs to developing countries of adapting to a global 2° C warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2050 will be between $70 billion and 100 billion per year[3]. Another study estimates the costs of adaptation for Africa a $10-30 billion or more a year by 2030[4].

Whatever happens to the landscape of international climate finance after 2015, spending on adaptation is likely to increase significantly. Increased flows of climate finance are likely to come from a variety of sources, including the international climate funds, domestic spending from national budgets, bilateral flows, and the private sector.

For adaptation to be successful it will need to be ‘mainstreamed’ into all aspects of development, including those funded by national budgets, not leaving it to activities funded by money from a ‘climate finance’ silo.

Assessing the effectiveness of adaptation throughout all processes – some key challenges

Given the need to pay for adaptation – whether through international climate finance, national budgets or other mechanisms – donors and governments are increasingly focused on the challenge of how to determine whether adaptation spending is effective.

Demonstrating the efficacy of adaptation measures – and by implication the effectiveness of the spending that is paying for them - is particularly difficult for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, although the effects of climate change are already being felt, climate change will continue – and indeed intensify – for decades and probably centuries to come.

There is therefore a significant mismatch between the timescales over which adaptation will need to occur and those typically associated with development and adaptation interventions.

These interventions, particularly those funded by international climate finance, typically have lifetimes of a few years. It is over these short timescales that interventions need to be evaluated, meaning that there is little scope for evaluations based on retrospective assessments of whether long-term adaptation goals have actually been realised (i.e. assessment of the ‘impacts’ of interventions).

In addition, adaptation will require different approaches and measures in different contexts, meaning that the assessment of adaptation success will need to be highly context-specific.

Continue to Part II

[1] Based on data from climatefundsupdate.org

[2] http://www.climatefinancelandscape.org/#introduction

[3] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2011/06/06/economics-adaptation-climate-change

[4] http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/economic-cost-of-climate-change-in-africa.pdf

Nick Brooks is the Director of Garama 3C Ltd, a small consultancy firm specialising in climate change adaptation and international development. He has played a leading role in the development of the Tracking Adaptation and Measuring Development (TAMD) framework, has developed indicators and related guidance for the International Climate Fund, and has worked on the M&E framework for DFID’s BRACED programme.

This blog is in 5 parts:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V