Evidence-based policy-making for climate resilience
OECD Working Paper on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning for Climate Risk Management
As countries respond to the increasing impacts of climate change, evidence-based policy-making for climate resilience has become ever more important. A crucial part of climate risk management is monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL). Effective MEL frameworks support governments and development co-operation in improving decision making under various uncertainties presented by climate change. They also facilitate continuous learning and adjustments as outcomes of interventions for climate risk management unfold over time.
Designing and using an MEL framework can help governments and development co-operation to tackle some of the major challenges to evidence-based policy-making on climate risk management. The development of an MEL framework for climate risk management faces a number of technical challenges. Key among these is the partial understanding of future changes in the climate, socio-economic and ecological systems. This is augmented by other challenges such as difficulties in attributing outcomes to specific interventions, moving baselines and targets on climate resilience, and long time frames for outcomes and impacts of climate risk management interventions to unfold.
To address these challenges, a team of DEval evaluators working on climate change adaptation introduce a conceptual framework on which governments and development co-operation providers can draw when developing MEL frameworks. They further present and discuss existing methods and tools that can help to deal with the technical challenges of MEL for climate risk management and provide examples of good practice for adjusting or updating existing MEL frameworks.
The publication “Monitoring, evaluation and learning for climate risk management” is part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Co-operation Working Papers series and contributes to the OECD initiative Strengthening Climate Resilience: Guidance for Governments and Development Co-operation, which aims to support the systematic integration of climate resilience into development co-operation.
Please cite this paper as Noltze, Martin; Köngeter, Alexandra; Römling, Cornelia and Dirk Hoffmann (2021), “Monitoring, evaluation and learning for climate risk management”, OECD Development Co-operation Working Papers, No. 92, OECD Publishing, Paris.