Adaptation strategies are key to anticipating the adverse effects of climate change, preventing or minimising its impacts, and taking advantage of opportunities that may arise.
However, knowing whether such strategies are on the right track to achieve their intended goals is neither straightforward nor simple. Adaptation processes are inherently complex: they take place over long timeframes, involve significant climate uncertainty, are context-specific and intersect across sectors, governance levels, and broader societal developments.
Despite having gained increasing attention on political and scientific agendas, translating this attention into action at scale and speed remains a significant challenge. Questions and concerns about the long-term effectiveness of adaptation actions, their ability to reduce vulnerability without creating or exacerbating new risks, and about how to integrate learnings and experiences from other cities and regions are prevalent among authorities and practitioners. They are also central to UNDERPIN’s scientific focus on developing outcome indicators for climate adaptation.
MEL beyond reporting
Developing Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) frameworks is critical to addressing some of the current climate adaptation challenges and moving towards more effective, adaptive and equitable adaptation outcomes. Monitoring adaptation, evaluating outcomes and impacts, and learning from different experiences and perspectives provide the evidence needed to understand whether actions and plans are reducing climate risks, improving adaptive capacities, to ultimately inform decision-making about what does or does not work and what needs to change.
Nonetheless, for MEL to support more effective climate adaptation, it needs to be understood as more than a reporting requirement. Measurement is not an end in itself: its purpose is to generate evidence that can support learning, inform decisions and help authorities adjust their actions as climate risks and adaptation evidence evolves. MEL should therefore be purpose-driven, grounded in the needs, realities, and context in which adaptation takes place and aligned across governance levels.
“In our experience of working with local and regional governments, the more effective MEL frameworks are the ones that, while ensuring consistency, accountability and transparency, are tailored to the needs of the local context and designed in a way that creates sufficient space for learning, flexibility and adaptive responses.”
Sanchita Bakshi, Head of MEL and Strategy at IIED Europe
Putting MEL into practice
Below, we highlights real-life practices from national and subnational authorities across Europe that use MEL to enhance learning, improve investment and prioritisation, capture the multiple benefits and trade-offs of adaptation, and reduce the risk of inadequate interventions (maladaptation), and inaction.
- MEL practices from the City of Košice (Slovakia): Turning citizens’ experiences into actionable adaptation data
To better understand Košice’s climate risks and capture citizens’ lived experiences around events such as extreme heat, the municipality decided to directly ask those affected by them.
Using an online tool, local authorities invited nearly 300 residents to identify the places where they experienced the greatest impacts from extreme heat and share their ideas on how to address them.
The result was a climate feeling map that provided key insights into how residents experience climate risks across the city. These insights helped inform the municipality’s climate adaptation plan and actions.
- Eastern Mediterranean: Embedding monitoring into localdecision-making
Adaptation is a long term process: as climate risks change, municipalities need to know what is working, where implementation is failing behind and when plans or investments needs to change. One municipality in the Eastern Mediterranean has sought to make this part of routine governance by establishing a Local Monitoring Team (LMT) that brings together municipal departments, technical experts, NGOs and citizen representatives.
Suited to its local context, LMT tracks 19 indicators covering three broad areas: whether adaptation measures are being delivered (adaptation action), whether they are strengthening resilience and institutional capacity (adaptation results), and how climate risks themselves are changing (climate risks). These include indicators spanning water stress, drought events, water reuse, days above 35°C, urban heat, flooding to climate-related health impacts.
Data are collected across municipal departments and partners and reviewed by the LMT. Every two years, findings are consolidated for the Municipal Council, Mayor and General Secretary, informing decisions on budgets, priorities, implementation timelines and adaptation pathways. Universities, NGOs, businesses and citizen representatives also contribute to reviewing the findings.
The experience shows how monitoring can become part of routine decision-making rather than a separate reporting exercise. The LMT creates a link between climate evidence, political discussion and implementation, helping keep climate resilience on the municipal agenda.
Stay tuned to our social media channels and website for our #MELMatters campaign to discover more adaptation-relevant practices from across Europe and globally!