Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-6 (section)

=== 6.4.6 Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks for Adaptation Used in Cities, Settlements and Infrastructures ===

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Urban adaptation plans can focus attention on the needs of marginalised or vulnerable communities including the elderly, children and the disabled ( [[#Dahiya--2020|Dahiya and Das, 2020]] ; Yang, Lee and Juhola, 2021). However, monitoring and evaluation (M&amp;E) frameworks for adaptation are far from being fully developed and operationalised both in theory and in practice for cities, settlements and infrastructures. See also [[IPCC:Wg2:Chapter:Chapter-17#17.5|Section 17.5]] for an assessment of monitoring and evaluation in climate adaptation. Despite significant experience on the application in other sectors (e.g., health, water, industry or business) or with other climate change objectives (e.g., emissions reduction), the assessment of adaptation efforts has been to date under-theorised in current urban adaptation literature (Berrang-Ford et al., 2019; Leiter et al., 2019; Olazabal et al., 2019b). There is also limited evaluation of new social innovations of the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, social financing, crowdfunding and low-cost urban infrastructure that can be enabling conditions for transformative urban adaptation ( [[#Dahiya--2020|Dahiya and Das, 2020]] ; Caprotti et al., 2017).

The challenges related to the evaluation of adaptation progress (lack of methods, agreed metrics, data and definitions, including the ambiguity of the concept of ‘adaptation’) have been widely recognised after the Paris Agreement by multiple organisations, including the OECD, the World Bank, the European Environment Agency and the Global Environment Facility (Ford et al., 2015; [[#Magnan--2016|Magnan, 2016]] ; Bours, McGinn and Pringle, 2014). Monitoring and evaluation systems in urban areas will necessarily be incremental and additive, and will have to build on existing indicator systems ( [[#Solecki--2020|Solecki and Rosenzweig, 2020]] ). There is a need to develop practical and efficient frameworks to assess adaptation progress across all levels of public and private decision making. This should include the assessment and consideration of top-down adaptations alongside informal, bottom-up community actions, or corporate-led programmes developed to reduce vulnerabilities and climatic risks and increase resilience ( ''high confidence'' , ''high agreement'' ).

On the one hand, there is a need to guarantee that planned adaptation actions are efficient, just and equitable (Olazabal et al., 2019b), including being able to disaggregate, for example by gendered impacts. On the other hand, there is a need to observe if and how environmental, social and economic vulnerability and climatic risk conditions evolve with time. Surveillance, monitoring and evaluation facilitate adaptation decision making by linking three aspects (Berrang-Ford et al., 2019): (1) changing vulnerabilities and risks, (2) established adaptation goals and targets, and (3) adaptation efforts put in place. The process will help evaluate whether current adaptation efforts are sufficient or adequate, thus enabling the learning process that adaptation action requires (Haasnoot, van’t Klooster and Van Alphen, 2018; Klostermann et al., 2018).

Monitoring and evaluation of government-led urban adaptation in major cities around the globe is largely missing (Araos et al., 2017; Olazabal et al., 2019a). This reveals: (1) a lack of awareness by local adaptation managers about the critical importance of monitoring and evaluation systems in adaptation decision making, (2) inadequacy, irrelevancy or underuse of available monitoring and evaluation resources, or (3) a lack of knowledge, capacity and resources to make monitoring and evaluation work in practice at city scale.

[[#Olazabal--2019b|Olazabal et al. (2019b)]] argue that six components are at least required to make monitoring and evaluation operational for urban adaptation planning: (1) the definition of a context-specific tailored system adapted to existing local institutions, (2) the definition of a responsible party (public authority, department, group or organisation) that will be in charge of monitoring and evaluation system management, (3) the definition and assignation of the appropriate budget over time, (4) the identification of monitoring objectives and indicators, (5) the definition of a method and process to evaluate outcomes of the monitoring process and finally, (6) the reporting process (how and who the outputs will be reported to). [[#Klostermann--2018|Klostermann et al. (2018)]] emphasise the importance of learning through iterative cycles of selection of monitoring objectives, procedures, data collection and evaluation, and inputs to adaptation policy and planning processes (see also discussion of evaluation and learning in [[IPCC:Wg2:Chapter:Chapter-17#17.5.1|Section 17.5.1.7]] ). Yet practical exemplary approaches are still missing.

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report acknowledged the lack of standard metrics to measure and monitor success in urban adaptation and suggested a list of indicators that could be developed, while also taking note of the localised nature of adaptation (see also (Rufat et al., 2015)). However, predominant approaches are typically not conducted at the appropriate scale to inform adaptation decision-making (Ford et al., 2018). While some scholars advocate the use of a unifying indicator of social vulnerability (Spielman et al., 2020), others propose to develop flexible sets of comparable indicators that can be adjusted to different contexts (Leiter et al., 2019). Risk-based approaches are seen as an alternative in a context where the monitoring of decision-relevant variables in urban climate adaptation planning is essential to link climatic risk assessment and action (Hallegatte and Engle, 2019; Kingsborough, Borgomeo and Hall, 2016; [[#McDermott--2018|McDermott and Surminski, 2018]] ). Because of the need to define normative frameworks for risk evaluation, what is acceptable, for what purpose and for how long (Galarraga et al., 2018), these approaches may offer an opportunity for the generation of a shared understanding on goals and limitations of adaptation ( [[#McDermott--2018|McDermott and Surminski, 2018]] ). However, risk-based indicators may also create a bias toward quantifiable variables that tend to be based on climatic modelling outputs, engineering or financial assessments. Based on this and various examples of urban development projects, Hallegatte and Engle (2019) claim it is important to consider output-based indicators and process-based indicators that talk about government, voice and empowerment. Overall, dozens of indicator-based approaches to assess climate adaptation have been proposed across the scientific and policy literature, especially in the broader framework of (community) resilience assessment tools ( [[#Sharifi--2016|Sharifi, 2016]] ; Feldmeyer et al., 2019), and in different sectors, for example the climate benefits of NBS (Kabisch et al., 2016; Donatti et al., 2020). Although these efforts may help to mainstream the evaluation of adaptation in current city evaluation initiatives, the development of comprehensive monitoring and evaluation systems is lacking.

There is little evidence on how best to make monitoring and evaluation approaches practical at the local scale. Cities worldwide face important social, environmental and economic conflicts related to resource inequality, poverty, environmental pollution and social tensions that coexist with climatic risks. It makes sense to integrate climate change adaptation assessment goals and needs into existing frameworks for the sake of efficiency. This will benefit small urban areas and cities in developing regions that often face data scarcity and may also find available indicators irrelevant to their realities and, thus, be required to adjust them (Simon et al., 2016). Efforts to coordinate frameworks for the assessment of sustainability (e.g., Local Agenda, sustainability appraisals), resilience (e.g., 100 Resilient Cities, new standards for urban resilience), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting (e.g., Global Covenant of Mayors for Energy and Climate) can be deployed to learn about contexts. However, they need to be applied with caution as enforcing external requirements may lead to local tensions during their application (for example Roberts et al., 2020). In a context where adaptation efforts need to be aggregated and evaluated across nations ( [[#Magnan--2016|Magnan, 2016]] ) and their implications on wider objectives such as sustainable development and social justice need to be assessed ( [[#Long--2019|Long and Rice, 2019]] ), urban adaptation monitoring and evaluation can inform national and international processes that enable a global stocktake of adaptation.

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