Coding and tracking adaptation finance: lessons and opportunities for monitoring adaptation finance across international and national scales

Description

Adaptation financing is a key ingredient of international efforts to support vulnerable countries in responding to climate change. Building a comprehensive picture of the scale and scope of such investments is needed to understand where financial flows are being targeted. Doing so requires robust systems for monitoring the flow of adaptation finance across scales – from international and national levels to project and household contexts. Despite this need, existing methodologies for coding and tracking adaptation finance are, by and large, inadequate. The fact that most systems solely track activities that make explicit reference to climate change adaptation within project objectives presents a stumbling block. 

Recognising that processes of coding and tracking of adaptation are executed for a number of different purposes (depending on the users and their respective needs), this paper argues for more innovative systems to be trialled and implemented at all levels. It calls for the diversification of categories used to track adaptation activities, to include factors such as sectoral distribution, geographic location, and type of adaptation. The paper proposes that efforts to track and code adaptation spending, and efforts to monitor effectiveness of adaptation activities, should be more closely aligned and integrated. 

This paper is primarily aimed at a technical audience – one broadly familiar with the intricacies of coding and tracking systems. However, key messages and potential next steps are relevant to all stakeholders in the climate finance debate. Many of the issues described – such as the political economy of coding and tracking – are typically neglected within technical discussions and merit greater attention from all associated stakeholders.

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