Planning and Action
Adaptation action takes place at many scales, serving different communities with distinct needs and aspirations. Customizing an adaptation solution to meet the needs of a neighbourhood, a town, or a larger region requires close study of local conditions and how each effort fits into larger schemes. Coordinating adaptations actions within larger contexts helps build resilience for more people, ecosystems, and landscapes.Those larger contexts include meeting standards in institution building to ensure responsible and accountable governance, planning, finance, and project implementation. Meeting these standards ensures the readiness of the community to successfully carry out the selected adaptation solutions.
Governance and Planning
An essential part of determining readiness for an adaptation project is tracking fulfillment of commitments, being aware of and avoiding activities that can counter a project's intention, and ensuring that social and environmental safeguards are observed. Processes such as National Adaptation Plans and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) help countries establish their own adaptation policies and coordinate them with implementing partners and international-funding institutions that manage finance arrangements.
Nationally Determined Contributions
Aimed at strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015. Under the Article 4.9 of the Agreement, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are communicated by Parties every five years. NDCs cover efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change by achieving the long-term goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
International Cooperative Actions
The Climate Cooperative Initiatives Database (C-CID) provides analyses of non-state and sub-national adaptation achieved through cooperative climate initiatives. These are collaborative arrangements between two or more parties that include at least one non-state actor – such as businesses, investors, civil society organizations, and faith-based organizations – or one subnational government actor – including municipalities, local communities, and regional governments. The Climate Initiative Tracker provides data on targets, organizational characteristics, participants' profiles, planned activities, and tangible outputs.
Viewpoints
GCA works with many institutions and individuals who report on their work, opinions, and other notable perspectives of ongoing work. This section features a collection of those contributions
Finance
Another crucial standard for gauging readiness for adaptation solutions is the strength of institutions and processes that manage financial transfers and responsible disbursements.
Climate-related Development Finance
Adaptation solutions need financing for implementation. That financing calls for accurate and up-to-date tracking of financial flows. With 38 member countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides financial flow information that supports establishing evidence-based international standards and finding solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental challenges.
Projects and Practices Database
The Projects and Practices Database provides an evolving overview of climate adaptation and resilience projects worldwide. It brings together interventions from a variety of funding and implementing agencies. These projects span all regions of the world with a particular focus on those active in Africa. Most of these interventions are multisectoral, with adaptation measures ranging from better planning to improving institutions, enhancing finance access, employing specific technical options, implementing nature-based solutions, and building capacity among others.