Toolkit: monitoring, evaluation, and learning for National Adaptation Plan processes

Introduction

As the impacts of climate change accelerate and intensify, there is an urgent need to increase adaptation ambition and action. Countries are increasingly using National Adaptation Plan (NAP) processes to design, implement, and learn from climate change adaptation efforts to reduce risks and vulnerabilities and increase resilience—particularly for the most vulnerable communities, groups, and ecosystems.  

Monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) are critical to enabling countries to understand whether NAP processes work, how they work, and for whom, and how to improve actions based on the insights gained. Continuously learning from NAP processes’ actions and adjusting our strategies accordingly is crucial to enhancing the effectiveness of adaptation and avoiding unintended negative effects from policies and interventions. MEL systems for NAP processes are also an important source of information for processes under the Paris Agreement, including assessing collective progress on the global goal of adaptation through the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience and, relatedly, the adaptation section of Biennial Transparency Reports.  

The NAP Global Network and Adaptation Committee have launched a new toolkit for MEL for NAP processes. This toolkit is designed for government teams in developing countries leading their country’s NAP processes to provide flexible yet concrete guidance on the planning, implementation, and revision of MEL systems, regardless of what stage countries are at in their NAP processes or the development and implementation of their MEL system.