Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-4 (section)

== 4.5.3.2 Monitoring and evaluation ==

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Monitoring and evaluation (M&amp;E) in adaptation implementation can promote accountability and transparency of adaptation financing, facilitate policy learning and sharing good practices, pressure laggards, and guide adaptation planning. The majority of research on M&amp;E focuses on specific policies or programmes, and has typically been driven by the needs of development organizations, donors, and governments to measure the impact and attribution of adaptation initiatives (Ford and Berrang-Ford, 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1502|1502]]</sup> . There is growing research examining adaptation progress across nations, sectors, and scales (Reckien et al., 2014; Araos et al., 2016a, b; Austin et al., 2016; Heidrich et al., 2016; Lesnikowski et al., 2016; Robinson, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r1503|1503]]</sup> . In response to a need for global, regional and local adaptation, the development of indicators and standardized approaches to evaluate and compare adaptation over time and across regions, countries, and sectors would enhance comparability and learning. A number of constraints continue to hamper progress on adaptation M&amp;E, including a debate on what actually constitutes adaptation for the purposes of assessing progress (Dupuis and Biesbroek, 2013; Biesbroek et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1504|1504]]</sup> , an absence of comprehensive and systematically collected data on adaptation to support longitudinal assessment and comparison (Ford et al., 2015b; Lesnikowski et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1505|1505]]</sup> , a lack of agreement on indicators to measure (Brooks et al., 2013; Bours et al., 2015; Lesnikowski et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1506|1506]]</sup> , and challenges of attributing altered vulnerability to adaptation actions (Ford et al., 2013; Bours et al., 2015; UNEP, 2017a) <sup>[[#fn:r1507|1507]]</sup> .

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