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Adaptation tracking for a post-2015 climate agreement

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 967–969 (2015)Cite this article

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A post-2015 climate agreement will require systematic approaches for tracking adaptation progress across Parties to the UNFCC. A number of steps need to be taken to improve adaptation measurement and reporting.

Adaptation has become a cornerstone of international climate policy and is likely to figure prominently in a new global climate agreement1. A key challenge facing the adaptation community will be to measure whether investments made in adaptation at the national level are reducing vulnerability, and whether new agreements in the global arena are translating to actual adaptation2,3,4. It is thus of paramount importance to develop standards, methodologies, indicators and baselines for assessing progress towards the adaptation goals of a new agreement. We refer to such work as 'adaptation tracking', a subcomponent of Monitoring, Reporting and Evaluation (MRE) that seeks to systematically identify, characterize and compare adaptation across nations and over time. Surprisingly, there has been little consideration of how to track adaptation across Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), with most discussion on MRE taking place in the context of specific national work-streams (for example, National Adaptation Plans) or with regards to funding decisions (for example within the Adaptation Fund Board). It thus remains unclear how commitments to facilitate adaptation under a post-2015 agreement would be meaningfully tracked.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Maillet for assistance with the manuscript. We acknowledge funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. S. E. Austin and A. Lesnikowski are in the Department of Geography, J. D. Ford, L. Berrang-Ford, M. Araos, McGill University, Montreal H3A 0B9, Canada and are in the Tracking Research on Adaptation to Climate Change Consortium (TRAC3); www.trac3.ca,

    J. D. Ford, L. Berrang-Ford, M. Araos, S. E. Austin & A. Lesnikowski

  2. www.trac3.ca,

    J. D. Ford, L. Berrang-Ford, M. Araos, S. E. Austin & A. Lesnikowski

  3. R. Biesbroek is in the Department of Social Sciences, Public Administration and Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen 6706 KN, The Netherlands and is in TRAC3,

    R. Biesbroek

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  1. J. D. Ford
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  5. S. E. Austin
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  6. A. Lesnikowski
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Correspondence to J. D. Ford.

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Ford, J., Berrang-Ford, L., Biesbroek, R. et al. Adaptation tracking for a post-2015 climate agreement. Nature Clim Change 5, 967–969 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2744

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