What Makes Climate Adaptation Work? Inside Adaptation Insights
Every year, billions are invested in helping communities adapt to climate change. But how do we know whether those investments actually make people and communities—particularly the most vulnerable—resilient to worsening climate risks?
Every year, billions are invested in helping communities adapt to climate change. But how do we know whether those investments actually make people and communities—particularly the most vulnerable—resilient to worsening climate risks?
Climate change is already disrupting food systems and agriculture worldwide, with smallholder farmers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) facing the most severe consequences while having the fewest resources to adapt. Over the past decade, rising temperatures, unpredictable rainfall, droughts, and flash floods have directly threatened food security and farming livelihoods for millions. As a result, climate adaptation is no longer a long-term goal to be considered in future planning; it is an urgent daily necessity, particularly for the most vulnerable.
Answering whether adaptation is working requires more than a general understanding of ongoing interventions. In order to ensure resources are accurately distributed, used to their full potential and reliable, it requires credible, evidence-based tracking to measure real-world impact, compare results across and within regions, and understand why certain solutions succeed while others lag.
This is the exact challenge CGIAR’s Adaptation Insights project was built to address. Rather than creating an isolated research program, the project focuses on identifying, refining, and organizing existing adaptation tools and methodologies, providing CGIAR, its partners, and the adaptation community with the tools to effectively measure and enhance adaptation interventions.
Building a Stronger Evidence Base
Funded by the Gates Foundation, Adaptation Insights is led by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) leads a global review of the methods and metrics used to track adaptation across policy and development institutions. At the same time, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) leads research on agricultural water management, combining satellite remote sensing and machine learning with traditional field data.
The project addresses a critical reality in climate science where there is no single, one-size-fits-all indicator for measuring adaptation. Different organizations often track similar goals, but they use different tools, indicators, and data formats. As a result, valuable evidence remains locked inside individual projects, making it difficult to compare findings, build cumulative knowledge, or understand why an approach succeeds in one context but fails in another.
As such, the core issue is not a lack of data, but a lack of connection. Adaptation Insights brings these fragmented approaches together so researchers and practitioners can not only build clear baseline comparisons but tap into a disconnected network that can support the advancement of adaptation tracking.
Moving from Fragmented Tools to Shared Standards
To create consistency without forcing rigid rules, Adaptation Insights is developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) alongside a flexible tracking framework. The SOPs offer step-by-step guidance for gathering and analyzing adaptation data across different settings.
Flexibility is essential. As highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), organizations operate with vastly different resources and frameworks. A national planning team with a modest budget cannot measure adaptation in the same way as a high-tech international research center. Effective tools must maintain scientific rigor while remaining practical for teams with limited resources or data.
To make these tools widely available, the project features two core platforms:
- Adaptation Tracking Methods Wiki: An open-access, regularly updated repository of tools for food, land, and water systems.
- System for Insights and Guidance on Measuring Adaptation (SIGMA): An analytical platform linking goals, indicators, collection methods, and data tools into one workspace.
Together, these platforms shift the focus away from basic output tracking, such as counting seed packets distributed, training sessions held, or irrigation channels built, toward real outcome evaluation. This means measuring whether an intervention actually reduced climate risk, stabilized crop yields during stress, and permanently improved a community’s ability to adapt while reducing the risk of maladaptive outcomes or displacing vulnerabilities to underserved populations.
What Practitioners Are Telling Us
The design of Adaptation Insights is shaped directly by experts working on adaptation. ILRI, supported by the Alliance of Bioversity International, CIAT, conducted 12 semi-structured consultations with CGIAR scientists, UN climate experts, government policymakers, financial institutions, development partners, and NGOs. The consultations complemented a questionnaire that was distributed to over 1000 experts across five key stakeholder groups (CGIAR colleagues, scientists, policy experts, IFIs and development partners, and other external stakeholders). The questionnaire received 47 total responses, and the semi-structured consultations provided a platform to further understand the existing methods, tools and frameworks experts rely on, while also gauging challenges, knowledge gaps and opportunities for progress.
These consultations highlighted four recurring barriers to current adaptation tracking:
- Short-Term Focus: Data collection is often tailored to meet quick donor reporting deadlines rather than studying long-term climate impacts.
- Resource Gaps: Many local institutions lack access to financing, advanced tools, satellite data, or specialized technical training.
- Inconsistent Metrics: Similar indicators are defined and measured differently from one project to another. This applies within and across institutions.
- Mismatched Timelines: Typical 3-to-5-year project cycles are too short to measure adaptation outcomes that take a decade or more to unfold.
These challenges create a major gap between delivering a project and proving long-term results. For example, it is relatively simple to report that 500 hectares of drip irrigation were installed. Without longer-term tracking, however, it is much harder to demonstrate whether household vulnerability to climate risks decreased over time, especially when unexpected weather events, market changes, or equipment breakdowns occur after the project ends.
From Activity to Real Impact
Adaptation Insights does not attempt to enforce a single definition of success because local context always shapes the outcome. A strategy that strengthens resilience in a drought-prone farming community may not be relevant for coastal communities facing recurrent flooding and salt-water intrusion.
Instead, Adaptation Insights innovates and refines data collection and analysis methodologies on shared, open-access platforms for the adaptation community to build upon. This not only connects a fragmented network, but also helps researchers pinpoint strong evidence, identify knowledge gaps, and design more advanced studies that are built upon existing knowledge rather than from scratch. The project also aligns directly with global goals, such as the UN’s Global Goal on Adaptation, by creating a lasting knowledge base that outlives short project cycles.
Ultimately, adaptation progress is not how many projects are launched or how much funding is spent. Progress depends on whether those investments genuinely reduce climate risks without displacing them, protect all livelihoods, and help communities—especially the most vulnerable—thrive, and are backed by reliable data that makes every future decision smarter.