How to Track Adaptation to Climate Change: A Typology of Approaches for National-Level Application
By J. Ford, L. Berrang‐Ford, A. Lesnikowski, Magda Barrera, S. J. Heymann. 2013
202 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The need to track climate change adaptation progress is being increasingly recognized but our ability to do the tracking is constrained by the complex nature of adaptation and the absence of measurable outcomes or indicators by which to judge if and how adaptation is occurring. We developed a typology of approaches by which climate change adaptation can be tracked globally at a national level. On the one hand, outcome-based approaches directly measure adaptation progress and effectiveness with reference to avoided climate change impacts. However, given that full exposure to climate change impacts will not happen for decades, alternative approaches focus on developing indicators or proxies by which adaptation can be monitored. These include systematic measures of adaptation readiness, processes undertaken to advance adaptation, policies and programs implemented to adapt, and measures of the impacts of these policies and programs on changing vulnerability. While these approaches employ various methods and data sources, and identify different components of adaptation progress to track at the national level, they all seek to characterize the current status of adaptation by which progress over time can be monitored. However, there are significant challenges to operationalizing these approaches, including an absence of systematically collected data on adaptation actions and outcomes, underlying difficulties of defining what constitutes "adaptation", and a disconnect between the timescale over which adaptation plays out and the practical need for evaluation to inform policy. Given the development of new adaptation funding streams, it is imperative that tools for monitoring progress are developed and validated for identifying trends and gaps in adaptation response.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7bbce2ea7f604e7cce9e8a59a9f092cc4ecfcea9
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- What drives national adaptation? A global assessment (2014, background): “Similarly, climate adaptation has been articulated as an important component of broader sustainable development goals, and has become an emerging priority in industrialized nations (Ford and Berrang-Ford 2011).”
- The governance of adaptation: choices, reasons, and effects. Introduction to the Special Feature (2016, background): “It is currently unclear what adaptation success looks like (Ford et al. 2013) and clarification is likely to be more difficult when adaptation governance aims for multiple goals at once (where trade-offs are likely needed).”
- The role of knowledge and power in climate change adaptation governance: a systematic literature review (2013, background): “…(2) the involvement of many interdependent actors with their own ambitions, preferences, responsibilities, problem framings and resources; and (3) the lack of a well-organized policy domain for enhancing and monitoring climate adaptation in the policy agenda (Ford et al. 2013, Termeer et al. 2013).”