Interrogating ‘effectiveness’ in climate change adaptation: 11 guiding principles for adaptation research and practice

Abstract

The Paris Agreement articulates a global goal on adaptation, which aims to ensure an 'adequate adaptation response' to the 'global temperature goal', and requires countries to report progress through periodic global stocktakes. However, there remain conceptual and methodological challenges in defining an adaptation goal and mixed evidence on what effective adaptation looks like and how it can be enabled. In this review, we demonstrate how different normative views on adaptation outcomes, arising from different epistemological and disciplinary entry points, can lead to very different interpretations of adaptation effectiveness. We argue that how effectiveness is framed will significantly impact adaptation implementation and outcomes. This, furthermore, represents a way of exercising influence in adaptation decision-making. Eleven principles of effective adaptation are distilled as a way to pluralize guidance in international processes such as the Global Stocktake as well as national and sub-national exercises on tracking and monitoring adaptation.

A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change

“…The remaining 19 (of 58) papers assumed risk reduction outcomes based on secondary evidence or theories of change. Among the possible explanations for the limited evaluative evidence in the literature are technical challenges related to risk reduction evaluation, including the lead time until responses show outcomes in terms of risk reduction, the difficulty of attributing such outcomes to the studied responses and the difficulty of measuring avoided impacts or risks 3,99,100 . Additionally, limited evaluative evidence could be related to differences among coders in the understandings of risk reduction, assumptions regarding outcomes based on related but non-climate change-specific literature and the difficulty of conceptualizing risk and factors that lead to risk reduction.…”

Research for climate adaptation

“…At one level, we heard an aspiration for metrics and indicators to monitor and assess progress towards the global goal on adaptation, in a manner that enables comparison across locations and over time. Yet such efforts also raise conceptual issues regarding what counts as adaptation, what constitutes effectiveness, how to respect the diversity of local contexts, and how do they differ from climate-resilient development [2][3][4] .…”

Rural vulnerability to water scarcity in Iran: an integrative methodology for evaluating exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity

“…Water, however, has a complex and nonlinear function in climate change adaptation since it may both facilitate adaptation and, if ignored, be a major source of disruption (Srivastava et al, 2022 ). It remains unclear about the effectiveness and benefits of water adaptation measures and whether or not those benefits also reduce climate risk (Singh et al, 2021 ). Maladaptation often results from ineffective planning and implementation, as well as a failure to address the root causes of vulnerability (Eriksen et al, 2021 ).…”