A new news and views piece “Tracking the status of global evidence” has just been published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The piece was written by Katharine Vincent as part of the journal’s Fifteenth Anniversary collection, which looks back at influential studies published over the past fifteen years.
Assessing the status of adaptation matters for targeting support and identifying priority gaps, and evaluation of adaptation efforts is mandated by the Paris Agreement. Parties have long debated how adaptation should be tracked for the Global Stocktake and the Global Goal on Adaptation, but attempts to operationalise these commitments have been hampered by the fact that adaptation is often context- and scale-specific, and so difficult to capture in comparable indicators. Evidence was scattered across many case studies, with no systematic empirical baseline against which to gauge collective progress.
The paper looks back at the 2021 study by Berrang-Ford and colleagues (through the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative, GAMI), which asked instead what the peer-reviewed literature reveals about implemented adaptation and its outcomes. Based on a large-n dataset it concluded that documented adaptation was largely fragmented, local and incremental, that coverage was uneven across sectors and regions, and that there was very limited evidence of reported actions actually reducing vulnerability or risk.
Five years on, the study remains a widely cited seminal assessment. It added empirical weight to concern that adaptation needs to be accelerated, and highlighted where evidence is absent. Because the analysis drew only on peer-reviewed literature, it reflects existing asymmetries in documentation, overlooking practical adaptation examples recorded in grey literature. GAMI participants have proposed a “GAMI 2.0” that would use machine learning more systematically and integrate grey literature and diverse knowledge systems, enabling a living evidence base in support of Paris Agreement commitments. How to advance this methodology remains pressing with the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report underway.