WRI Publications Feed: Vulnerability and Adaptation: Information

Case Study: Applying Information for Adapting the Agriculture Sector in Bundelkhand, India

Sarah Parsons — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:25:44 -0400

This case study examines two projects implemented by Development Alternatives to highlight the multiplicity of data sources involved in adaptation decision making, provide an analysis of how information was used, and explore the challenges associated with information use for adaptation decision making in the agricultural sector.

This case study is part of a series under the World Resources Institute project, Information for Climate Adaptation in South Asia: Identifying User Needs. Each of the case studies in this set explores an aspect of information use in adaptation decision making. The goals of this series are two-fold:

Provide insights into how information (such as climate projections, stakeholder interviews, and environmental monitoring) can be used to support adaptation decisions; and
Guide investments by national governments and their development partners in information systems that can inform decision making around risks related to climate change.

This case study series was supported by the UK Department for International Development. Case study authors used the same framework of guiding questions for their research, which consisted of literature reviews and interviews.

Case Study: Information Use in Nepal's National Adaptation Programme of Action

Sarah Parsons — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:14:36 -0400

Nepal is passing through a turbulent period of transition, reorganizing its internal political boundaries, establishing a federal structure, and changing the very nature of the national government. Since 2008, Nepal’s priorities have been dominated by these political imperatives, a post-conflict peace process, and attempts to integrate Maoist ex-insurgents into the national mainstream. This dynamic presents numerous challenges for the government in seeking to meet the country’s development and environmental needs. Climate change adds extra stress to these needs in the form of heightened weather variability, extreme events, and other impacts on the country’s natural and social systems.

Provide insights into how information (such as climate projections, stakeholder interviews, and environmental monitoring) can be used to support adaptation decisions; and
Guide investments by national governments and their development partners in information systems that can inform decision making around risks related to climate change.

Case Study: Communicating Modeled Information for Adaptation Decision Making

Sarah Parsons — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:30:27 -0400

The HighNoon project, which began in 2009, set out to assess the impact Himalayan glacier retreat and expected changes in the Indian summer monsoon on the distribution of water resources in Northern India. The project’s aim was “to recommend appropriate and efficient response strategies to enable adaptation to hydrological extreme events.” The project used information from scenarios generated by regional climate and hydrological models and integrated it with stakeholder perspectives to identify and prioritize adaptation strategies. This case study examines the HighNoon project in order to explore how adaptation-relevant information can best be packaged and disseminated to different users and audiences at the state, district, and block levels.

This case study is part of a series that fall under the World Resources Institute project, Information for Climate Adaptation in South Asia: Identifying User Needs. Each of the case studies in this set explores an aspect of information use in adaptation decision making. The goals of this series are two-fold:

Provide insights into how information (such as climate projections, stakeholder interviews, and environmental monitoring) can be used to support adaptation decisions; and
Guide investments by national governments and their development partners in information systems that can inform decision making around risks related to climate change.

Information for Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons and Needs in South Asia

Sarah Parsons — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:21:39 -0400

Ideally, adaptation information will be tailored to meet the needs of individual information users. However, in many cases, information is supply-driven, shaped in large part by the interests of researchers and the limited data available to them. In these cases, it’s oftentimes challenging for users to access, understand, and apply the information available to them. To support effective adaptation over the long term, improved systems for producing, managing, using, disseminating, and learning from information in South Asia are needed. Significant new capacities will likely need to be developed to meet these needs.

This paper served as background for a South Asian regional workshop, which brought together adaptation information users and producers, as well as climate change experts. The workshop aimed to inform likely new investments in the information base for climate adaptation. Convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Development Alternatives, with support from the UK Department for International Development, the workshop intended to identify:

priorities for information investment,
opportunities for improving information use, and
mechanisms for deepening dialogue between information users and producers in the region.

This paper aimed to support progress toward these workshop objectives by:

identifying barriers to effective information production, access, and application in the South Asian region;
posing a practical vocabulary for characterizing relevant information types;
articulating a concise set of uses for adaptation information; and
raising a set of critical issues around which to frame workshop discussions.

The paper draws on desk and interview research conducted by WRI from November 2011 through February 2012, as well as feedback obtained from a roundtable event held on the margins of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties-17 in Durban, South Africa.

Making Adaptation Count: Concepts and Options for Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Adaptation

Kevin Lustig — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:07:25 -0400

This report was made possible with support from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Executive Summary

Adaptation, Development, and Monitoring and Evaluation

The impacts of climate change increasingly threaten the achievement of poverty reduction and other development objectives, including the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Research suggests that impacts over the course of the 21st century, if unaddressed, could cause a 5–10 percent loss in global gross domestic product (GDP), with poor countries’ wealth declining in excess of 10 percent.¹ Even more significant are the potential threats to human security – reduced agricultural production, heightened water scarcity, exposure to droughts, floods, storms, and diseases.²

As developing country governments and their international partners grow increasingly aware of these threats, they are turning to options for adapting to climate change in the development context. However, the national, sectoral, and project-based adaptation plans and policies now emerging are largely in their infancy and relatively untested. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of such initiatives, as they are implemented across the developing world, will be critically important for judging their effectiveness and making decisions on which efforts to scale up as climate impacts intensify. Industrialized countries and donor agencies channeling billions of dollars into adaptation finance, including under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will require such systems as an important dimension to the adaptation initiatives they support.

About This Publication

This paper aims to provide adaptation and development practitioners with a practical framework for developing M&E systems that can track the success and failure of adaptation initiatives in the development context. It is based upon a series of convenings, case studies, and interviews conducted by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In particular, the authors reviewed M&E systems in the planning and implementation stages for several relevant GIZ and Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau Bankengruppe (KfW or German Development Bank) natural resource management and adaptation projects in India.

We expect adaptation M&E practice will evolve substantially in the years ahead. We offer this guidance in the hope that capturing early lessons in adaptation can propel future successful efforts. This paper addresses the planning, design, and early implementation stages of adaptation interventions. The key framework can also serve as a basis for funders and their partners to develop or analyse programmatic agendas, formulate evaluation questions, or supplement guidance on M&E in a specific sector or thematic area.

The core principles presented in this report center around the importance of M&E as a tool to shape successful adaptation efforts. We also recognize, however, that M&E can serve other useful purposes. For example, it can help identify positive synergies between efforts towards adaptation and other objectives, such as economic growth or climate change mitigation.

The guidance presented here is limited to the scope of our research and consultations and has not yet been substantially tested in the field. Practitioners will undoubtedly need to adjust their use of this paper to the unique needs of specific interventions, and to existing M&E systems and management standards. Furthermore, analysis of adaptation strategies and efforts beyond the intervention level are largely beyond the scope of this paper. Very different methodologies may be needed to assess, for example, large-scale, countrywide adaptation strategies, or sector-wide adaptation efforts. Finally, as practitioners, governments, and other development cooperation partners progress in this emerging field, much remains to be tested and learned about “what works” in adaptation and how to measure it.

Stern 2006. ↩
UNDP 2008a. ↩