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Assessing adaptation progress for the global stocktake

Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 413–414 (2023)Cite this article

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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) global stocktake tracks progress towards achieving the three global goals of the Paris Agreement — mitigation, adaptation and support. The global goal on adaptation is to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change, with a view to contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response. Attempts at demonstrating progress towards this imprecisely worded goal have revealed “methodological, empirical, conceptual and political challenges” that the 2021–2023 Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh work programme aims to address1.

Adaptation in developing countries often occurs as discrete interventions via projects financed by public sources, including multilateral funds and bilateral donors. Evaluating these interventions could be an important contribution to the global stocktake2, which includes a review of the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation action and support. However, lack of reporting and evaluation rigour hinders the assessment of adaptation effectiveness. We identify four challenges related to the availability and quality of evidence for assessing adaptation progress, and propose solutions (Table 1).

Table 1 Challenges and solutions for assessing adaptation progress
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References

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Acknowledgements

This Correspondence is informed by an attempt at assessing the effectiveness of adaptation finance for externally funded projects. Our funding was discontinued in March 2021 as a result of a reduction in the UK’s budget for Official Development Assistance, and therefore the assessment could not be completed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Nella Canales & Biljana Macura

  2. Stockholm Environment Institute, Bonn, Germany

    Richard J. T. Klein

  3. Stockholm Environment Institute, Oxford, UK

    Inès Bakhtaoui

Authors
  1. Nella Canales
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  2. Richard J. T. Klein
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  3. Inès Bakhtaoui
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  4. Biljana Macura
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Correspondence to Biljana Macura.

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Canales, N., Klein, R.J.T., Bakhtaoui, I. et al. Assessing adaptation progress for the global stocktake. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 413–414 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01656-x

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