Abstract
Adaptation has increasingly become one of the key pillars in climate action in the face of growing global climate-related risks and the insufficiency of mitigation efforts to minimize those risks effectively. However, contrary to mitigation, adaptation has never enjoyed a strong consensus in terms of its ultimate goal, indicators, and measurement, so that monitoring and evaluating global adaptation efforts is a significant challenge. Multiple approaches exist, focusing on different aspects and relying on different procedures and data. Moreover, there is an increasing consensus that adaptation and resilience-building are strongly context-dependent endeavors. Both their design and assessment must be adjusted to the characteristics of specific initiatives, sectors, realities, or territories. At the same time, however, a universal, coherent framework is needed to aggregate and validate outcomes and favor collective learning and cross-fertilization between initiatives. In this paper, we review existing frameworks to measure and evaluate adaptation and resilience-building efforts. We identify key challenges, opportunities, and tensions they encounter. We then discuss the experience from the Race to Resilience Campaign that catalyzes actions by non-state actors to build the resilience of 4 billion people from groups and communities who are vulnerable to climate risks, with a particular focus on its Metrics Framework, precisely as an effort to combine global-level needs for data comparability and aggregation with the flexibility required for the heterogeneity of adaptation and resilience-building efforts. We conclude with a reflection on the particular challenge of data validation and quality assurance this endeavor implies.
Presenters
Marco BilliResearcher, Governance and Science-Policy Interface, Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2, Chile Roxana Borquez
Center for Climate and Resilience Research Paulina Aldunce
Professor, Environmental Sciences and Renewable Natural Resources, University of Chile, Chile
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Technical, Political, and Social Responses
KEYWORDS
Adaptation efforts, Resilience, Monitoring and evaluation, Race to Resilence; COP
