Monitoring and evaluation in adaptation

This report provides a review of various monitoring and evaluation (M&E) methods and steps applicable to climate adaptation decision-making. It also presents key principles of good M&E for adaptation projects and discusses two case study examples of M&E in the context of local government level adaptation to sea-level rise. The value of this report is that it identifies current practices in M&E frameworks for climate adaptation as well as identifies potential best practices that could be adopted more broadly by the local government sector across Australia. Firstly, we note that increasingly various stakeholders are demanding standardised M&E approaches for climate adaptation projects, rather than having flexible and context relevant approaches. The demand for standardisation is partlydue to stakeholder experiences with climate mitigation projects in which measures used for evaluationcan be standardised. For adaptation M&E however there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution (Spearmanand McGray 2011; Bours et al. 2014a,b; EEA 2015) and therefore, in this report, we only showcasepotential methods and examples of M&E projects.