Publication

29.07.2015

Proceedings Report: Regional Training workshop on “Evaluating climate change adaptation practices in Central Asia”, 11-12 July 2012, Almaty, Kazakhstan

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Previous needs assessments and gap analysis study in adaptation to climate change within APAN identify the priority sectors in Central Asia where urgent adaptation actions are necessary, which are water, agriculture and natural disasters. At the same time it was found that currently it is challenging to do an effective planning of further adaptation activities since there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation of the progress of on-going and the effectiveness of implemented adaptation projects. Moreover, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of adaptation is globally one of the weakest areas of adaptation practice. Thus the assessments reports and a series of consultations in the region of Central Asia highlight the need in improving the capacity of the key stakeholders in the region on evaluation knowledge and skills.

Although in Central Asia there is a number of stakeholders conducting trainings related to adaptation to climate change (e.g. UNDP trainings on disaster risk management, CAMP Alatoo on capacity building programme development, etc.), only a few capacity building activities were conducted on the issues of assessment and evaluation methods. Moreover, the outcome of APAN consultation meeting in Turkmenistan, September 2011, suggests the relevance of such trainings for targeted subject matter specialists or technical experts in different sectors, as well as policy- makers.

The international experience in evaluation and measurement of the effectiveness of adaptation projects, programmes and policies suggests that it is a complex issue, since the adaptation interventions vary by sector, scale and approaches. Thus a range of different approaches exist to measure effectiveness of adaptation. Some assessment methodologies aim at measuring the progress (processbased methods) and some measure the effectiveness of the intervention (outcome-based method). 2 The other way of how the M&E tools in adaptation can be divided is by objective. Some of these categories include economic efficiency tools, effectiveness tools and improvementoriented participatory tools.

CAREC, which since 2010 functions as a sub-regional node (SRN) of APAN, has conducted the first training on 11-12 of July for policy-makers and practitioners of Central Asia specifically targeted at evaluation methods of projects and programmes on adaptation to climate change