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. This working paper focuses on the role of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) for promoting climate risk management. Effective MEL frameworks support governments and development co-operation in improving decision making under various uncertainties presented by climate change. The development of a MEL framework for climate risk management faces a umber of technical challenges. Key among these challenges 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, this paper aims to: i) introduce a conceptual framework that governments and development co-operation providers can draw on when developing MEL frameworks, ii) present and discuss existing methods and tools that can help to deal with the technical challenges of MEL for climate risk management, and iii) provide examples of good practice for adjusting or updating existing MEL frameworks.
