Timo Leiter

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (GRI)

Adaptation to climate change has become a top priority of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. However, most of the literature on global climate governance focuses on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. This article therefore proposes a framework for tracking negotiation...

▶ The number and financial volume of adaptation actions supported by the Adaptation Fund (AF), the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) have more than doubled between 2016 and 2018 and have remained constant since 2019 at an average of around US$500 million per year. Without further increases, increasing climate risks...

This section in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerabilty synthesizes the state of knowledge on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of adaptation to climate change. It outlines what literature says on the purposes, approaches and indicators used for adaptation. In an advancement over the previous IPCC...

Although over 70 countries adopted a national climate change adaptation plan (NAP), little is known about the extent to which these plans are implemented. NAP monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems can play an important role in tracking implementation but have rarely been studied. Based on a systematic review including outreach to country represen...

A monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system will be a critical part of Canada’s upcoming first National Adaptation Strategy. This paper provides guidance on key elements of a robust M&E system and identifies nine best practices for Canada to guide its development. The paper is part of a series of knowledge products to guide an ambitious adaptation pol...

Leading evaluation practitioners were asked about lessons from the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) for evaluation practice. Contributors emphasize the importance of evaluating equity between rich and poor countries and other forms of climate injustice. The role of the evaluation is questioned: what can evaluation be expected to do on...

This perspective identifies how recent advances contribute to re-evaluating and re-constructing global environmental negotiations as a research object by calling into question who constitutes an actor and what constitutes a site of agreement formation. Building on this scholarship, we offer the term agreement-making to facilitate further methodolog...

This chapter of UNEP's 2021 Adaptation Gap Report looks at the global state of implemented adaptation to climate change. It uses three data sources: project documents from UNFCCC climate funds (the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund, and the Global Environment Facility), adaptation projects funded by the top-10 bilateral donors, and adaptation...

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthe...

We present the first systematic, global stocktake of the academic literature on human adaptation. We screen 48,316 documents and identify 1,682 articles that present empirical research documenting human efforts to reduce risk from climate change and associated hazards. Coding and synthesizing this literature highlights that the overall extent of ad...

This chapter of UNEP's Adaptation Gap Report 2020 looks at available evidence of implementation of climate change adaptation globally. It compares adaptation responses documented in the scientific literature with project proposals from the Adaptation Fund, the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility. While close to 400 projects and a...

This Background Paper published by the Global Commission on Adaptation on the day of the UN Climate Summit in September 2019 provides a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of climate adaptation metrics. It outlines what adaptation metrics are, what purposes they can be used for, which limitations they have, and how they are being applie...

The need to understand progress in climate change adaptation is increasingly being recognized at the global, national and subnational levels, including in the context of the Paris Agreement. Indicators or metrics are commonly viewed as being critical to this process. The article first examines distinct characteristics of climate change adaptation a...

Implementation of climate change adaptation is increasing globally, and many climate funds, implementing agencies, international and civil-society organisations are now managing a sizable portfolio of adaptation projects. So far only a few accounts exist of how these organisations are assessing the results of their adaptation work at the project an...

This policy brief examines the feasibility and practicability of a set of common global adaptation indicators and their use in context of the Paris Agreement. It looks at the different purposes of applying adaptation metrics and provides recommendations for their targeted use, in particular in the Global Stocktake.

This chapter of the Adaptation Gap Report provides an overview of the provisions of the Paris Agreement related to assessment and reporting of adaptation and how they are related. It also provides a generic framework of reviewing the overall progress in achieving the global goal on adaptation based on multiple sources of Information.

Opportunities and limits of connecting the monitoring of the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction are explored. The policy brief provides recommendations for complementary national and global monitoring and reporting towards their objectives in regard to...

This submission from GIZ (Germany's International Development Agency) to a call from the UNFCCC Nairobi Work Programme on indicators of adaptation and resilience outlines GIZ's work and experience on adaptation monitoring and evaluation in regard to (1) tools and approaches, (2) capacity building for partner countries, and (3) international knowled...

This policy brief addresses the difficulties of determining vulnerability through global indices and gives recommendations on how to use and interpret them including in the international climate policy context. The policy brief is based on a comparison of country rankings of four common vulnerability and risk indices.

The Paris Agreement calls for enhanced transparency of adaptation action and an assessment of collective progress via a Global Stocktake. This policy brief outlines how country-specific monitoring and evaluation (M&E) can provide valuable information on adaptation actions and results and how this supports the implementation of the Paris Agreement....

With increasing implementation of climate change adaptation policies and projects as well as continued integration of adaptation into planning processes, there is an increasing need to understand the results of these adaptation interventions. Are they achieving their objectives? Are they actually leading to a reduction in vulnerability to climate c...

Monitoring, evaluation and learning are useful to further enhance the knowledge base and make the case for community-based adaptation (CBA). The chapter outlines four considerations for the development of climate adaptation monitoring and evaluation systems: the purpose, the content, the target group, and the available capacities and resources. To...

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts to prepare for, adjust to, and reduce the impacts of climate change—a process known as adaptation—can help to understand the results of adaptation interventions and better account for progress over time. Information on adaptation is so far typically gathered through either project and program, or national-lev...

Adaptation is increasingly recognised as essential when dealing with the adverse impacts of climate change on societies, economies and the environment. However, there is insufficient information about the effectiveness of adaption policies, measures and actions. For this reason, the establishment of monitoring programmes is considered to be necessa...

This commentary debunks the claims of an article which stated that a global cooling trend would exist and that climate change would not have any implications for defense in the artic. Both claims are found to be wrong.