How to Track Adaptation to Climate Change: A Typology of Approaches for National-Level Application

The authors have developed a typology of approaches by which climate change adaptation can be tracked globally at a national level. Given that full exposure to climate change impacts will not happen for decades, alternative approaches that focus on developing indicators or proxies by which adaptation can be monitored are identified. 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. The authors also identify 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.