Publication

The scale of climate change adaptation investments demands robust assessments of the expected and actual returns. We need to know how effectively 

adaptation keeps development on track and equally importantly how equitably adaptation costs and benefits are distributed. Adaptation initiatives may be placed into three broad categories: addressing the existing ‘adaptation deficit’; managing  incremental changes in climate-related risks; and proactively addressing the more profound longer term manifestations and impacts of climate change by transforming or replacing existing systems and practices. Most climate change response evaluation frameworks essentially assume that adaptation can and will ‘neutralise’ the impacts of climate change, enabling development to meet targets that were originally set without any reference to the potential impacts of climate change – in other words, targets set under assumptions of a stationary climate. Such frameworks underestimate the potential need for transformative change. Current adaptation policy and practice are often shortsighted. They largely focus on improving the ability to cope with current climate variability, and on ‘climate proofing’ development investments to address incremental changes in existing climate-related risks, in the near term. The need for transformational change is demonstrated in the scientific literature but is only referred to rhetorically in climate change programmes that struggle to shift from business as usual strategies. 

Climate change is changing the contexts in which development takes place by changing the nature and intensity of climate-related risks, and through the impacts of evolving climate-related risks on people’s vulnerability. Current development interventions that fail to address climate change, and current climate change interventions that fail to appreciate where business as usual cannot be secured through incremental adaptation, are likely to result in unintended consequences including ‘maladaptation’. Developing countries will need to track these consequences and consider how policies and service delivery act to support or undermine adaptive capacity at different levels. Longersighted, more context-specific approaches that address changing risk contexts and that allow for flexible responses to uncertain changes in climate and unintended consequences of development interventions are needed for planning, implementing and assessing adaptation to climate change. 

An ‘open source’, rather than a proprietary, approach to the development of a framework for adaptation evaluation is proposed here. The purpose is to co-produce and promote an approach that will enable a variety of actors, including developing country governments and other bodies within developing countries, to formulate, implement and evaluate climate change policies and actions. 

We propose an approach to the evaluation of adaptation ‘success’ that combines assessment of how well climate risks to development are managed by institutions (‘upstream’ indicators), with assessment of how successful adaptation interventions are in reducing vulnerability and keeping development ‘on track’ in the face of changing climate risks (‘downstream’ indicators). The aim here is to provide a framework that defines indicators’ categories or ‘domains’ that can be tailored to specific contexts, rather than a ‘toolkit’ for monitoring and evaluation that prescribes particular indicators. This approach combines capacity-related indicators with indicators of vulnerability and the assessment of development outcomes under climate change. The approach also addresses issues of moral hazard and information asymmetry. By looking at how climate risk is managed by authorities and linking this with the vulnerability of and development outcomes experienced by the climate vulnerable poor, the framework shows whether and how the adaptation needs of marginalised groups are addressed, and what safeguards are in place to 

prevent maladaptation.