Background and problem definition: Climate change impacts and the imperative for adaptation trackingClimate change is a major societal challenge, with its devastating impacts increasingly being felt worldwide. Extreme weather events and environmental changes attributable to fluctuations in climatic conditions have widespread impacts, including altering ecosystems, reducing agricultural production, and increasing the prevalence of pests and diseases, with significant economic, social, and ecological consequences (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2022d). Climate change impacts are evident in the livestock sector. After four years of shifts in the rainy seasons and drought in the Horn of Africa, by 2022, close to nine million livestock had died, adversely impacting livestock keepers' food security, incomes, and countries' economic stability (OCHA, 2022). As temperatures continue to rise, it is estimated that in the next 60 years, annual losses in global cattle production could reach 40 billion US Dollars due to heat stress on livestock (Ericksen et al., 2022).Since the livestock sector plays a crucial role in national economies and livelihoods, state and non-state actors continue to adopt measures to respond to the impacts of climate change. Such measures include adjustments in farm practices such as water harvesting and storage, feed production and conservation, and diversification of livelihood options (Mubiru et al., 2018;Rojas-Downing et al., 2017). In terms of policy efforts, more than a third of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) identify the livestock sector as one of the areas where adaptation is desperately needed (Rose et al., 2021). In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, the three countries central to this dissertation, the livestock sector is also prominently featured in multiple national policies, such as national adaptation plans and strategies, as well as in subnational and sectoral plans relevant to climate change adaptation, highlighting a wide range of adaptation priorities (Ashley, 2019). As such, systematically assessing progress on efforts to respond to current and future impacts of climate change across and within sectors and populations, across space and time, is essential for understanding if adaptation is taking place and its effects. This assessment process is referred to as adaptation tracking (Berrang-Ford et al., 2019;Ford et al., 2013) 1 .1 Although the process of monitoring and reporting on adaptation is also commonly referred to as adaptation Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), I prefer to use the term adaptation tracking to distinguish the process from the traditional M&E which is often associated with interventions monitoring and evaluation within programs and projects. Adaptation tracking involves broader temporal and spatial scales that go beyond the typical time and spatial boundedness of programs and projects. Chapter 1 Adaptation tracking can serve multiple interrelated objectives. First, tracking adaptation is useful for collating information on the adaptation e...