International Workshop on Evaluating Climate Change and Development

10 - 13 May. Alexandria, Egypt. The workshop themes were climate change mitigation (including policy and market interventions in sectors such as energy and transportation) and adaptation (including land degradation, agricultural development, water management, preparedness for natural disasters, and climate resilience). This exercise was envisaged to involve approximately 120 evaluation specialists, researchers, policy and decision makers who make use of evaluation products.

The Global Environmental Facility Evaluation Office, the primary organizers of this International Workshop on Climate change has commissioned scoping materials pertaining to on-going and completed evaluations of projects and programs for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The purpose of these materials is to help describe the current state of the evaluation field in international development, build a common understanding of how evaluations can benefit work on reducing the impacts of climate change, and also identify the key areas that have yet to be addressed in terms of methodologies, indicators and results.

These materials are divided into three reports, which cover three different topic areas and include the current state of affairs as well as recommendations for the future:

• On-line Mitigation Database - This is a searchable inventory of over 400 documents, including 235 evaluations of on-going and completed projects related to climate change mitigation, with a small portion related to adaptation issues. The database is composed of the published materials of bilateral donor agencies, international financial institutions, UN Agencies, research organizations, think-tanks and NGOs.
• Monitoring and Evaluation of GEF Adaptation to Climate Change Projects - This piece is a review of adaptation projects implemented via the Global Environmental Facility's Strategic Priority on Adaptation, the Special Climate Change Fund and the Least Developed Country Fund. It proposes a series of recommendations on how the GEF might develop and expand the scope of its evaluation work with an "M&E Framework for Adaptation."
• A Meta-Evaluation of Adaptation and Natural Hazard Risk Management Projects: Results Assessment - This report proposes a framework for the meta-evaluation of adaptation efforts to deal with the growing impacts of climate change. It is based on evaluations of natural hazard risk programs, which served as proxies for adaptation programs, and extracts the lessons learnedfrom a portfolio of case studies from the public and private sectors. (forthcoming)