Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)

The impacts of climate change do not happen overnight but play out over decades. Funders looking to support people to adapt to those impacts must take the long view and accept that their investments may not provide measurable outcomes for ten years or more.

Land is cheap and is perceived to be abundant in Africa. A scramble for its land, following the food and fuel crisis three years ago, is on. European and North American companies have been acquiring land to grow export and biofuel crops and to supply their need for pulp and paper. Now they’re being joined by newly emerging economies – in particular Brazil, India and China – which are also increasingly acquiring large tracts of land and searching for other natural resources, in particular water and minerals.

There has been growing interest in measuring progress in climate change adaptation. This has partly been driven by the Bali Action Plan adopted at the Conference of Parties 13, which stressed the need for prioritising and incentivising adaptation actions. Without knowing how effective adaptation actions are it is impossible to prioritise and incentivise them.