6.1 Understanding drivers and purposes

Implementation of an adaptation strategy and/or adaptation plan provides a useful focus for monitoring and evaluating progress in adaptation to climate change. The development of Monitoring, Reporting and Evaluation (MRE) systems is often driven by legal and administrative requirements at the national, European or international level. MRE can serve multiple purposes, including tracking progress, assessing what has been accomplished and effectiveness of adaptation policies, enhancing the knowledge base and awareness of adaptation, increasing accountability, and learning to support improvement of adaptation policies, policymaking and practices. It provides feedback on adaptation progress and performance, such as whether the adaptation goals, targets and efforts are sufficient and how they contribute to reducing vulnerability to climate change. However, the overarching goal of MRE is to enable new information and lessons learned to shape future decisions, within an iterative policy and agenda setting cycle. MRE also helps communicating the processes and outcomes of adaptation and to mainstream adaptation in sectors when it is done in an integrated way.

To evaluate adaptation policies, programmes, measures, etc. and apply criteria, like their effectiveness, efficiency or coherence, it must be clear what the reference for the evaluation is. Therefore, a useful MRE does not start at the very end of the adaptation policy cycle, but is included in every step: by setting goals and well-defined objectives that are as specific as possible in planning documents and when identifying and assessing adaptation options (Step 3 and Step 4), as well as monitoring over time the baseline conditions and progress. The evaluation itself needs to be a specific and separate effort to focus on getting deeper insights to provide lessons, feeding back into adaptation policy revision. Only a limited number of countries gained deeper insights via evaluation (see EEA Report No 6/2020).

The 2024 EEA Briefing on Climate-ADAPT case studies highlights and promotes lessons learned from case studies on implementing and adjusting adaptation actions, building on MRE schemes. In the Climate-ADAPT Case study explorer, users can use the ‘Adaptation approaches’ filter to find case studies that report on dedicated MRE schemes.