Recent climate adaptation reports highlight a familiar challenge: it is often easier to track what has been done than to know whether risks are actually being reduced or resilience strengthened. A recent New Zealand assessment, alongside international guidance, points back to a basic sequence: clarify the outcomes being sought first, then develop indicators and other evidence that can show what is changing at the appropriate scale.
UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot report sets the wider context. Under current policies and near-term trajectories, exceeding 1.5°C is now widely assessed as unavoidable. The task is therefore not only to keep reducing emissions, but also to adapt to changing conditions while limiting how far temperatures rise and how long the period of overshoot lasts.
A previous LfS post, Adaptation under uncertainty: reflections on climate change overshoot and resilience, looked more broadly at what adaptation means when conditions themselves continue to change.
That wider context leads to a practical challenge shared internationally: moving from broad goals and accounts of activity to evidence of reduced risk. The experience of individual countries helps show what that challenge looks like in practice.
Aotearoa New Zealand provides a useful illustration of this wider challenge. The Climate Change Commission’s 2026 Progress report: National adaptation plan finds that adaptation is not keeping pace with escalating climate risks, and that progress since its previous assessment has been uneven.
The Commission also explains why monitoring adaptation progress is difficult. Adaptation needs are context specific because climate change affects different systems, places and communities in different ways. Results can take a long time to become visible, while climate risks and impacts continue to change. This makes learning by doing important, with monitoring and evaluation helping to show what is happening and where actions may need to be adjusted.
What the New Zealand assessment shows
The objectives in the first national adaptation plan make that harder. The Commission notes that they are not specific, measurable or time-bound, and that their framing mixes actions, outcomes and broader statements. Elsewhere in the report it finds that progress reporting is largely focused on whether delivery milestones have been met, rather than whether actions are reducing risk or improving resilience. What is missing is a clear line linking risks, outcomes, actions and milestones.
For the next national adaptation plan, the Commission calls for an intervention logic showing how actions address risks and contribute to change at national, regional and local scales. It also calls for clear outcomes over different timeframes, and an outcomes-focused monitoring and evaluation framework that supports learning and adjustment.
There is an important place-based dimension to this. The Commission sets out a role for local government in leading place-based adaptation planning and implementation within national settings, including local risk assessment, options assessment, community engagement and monitoring. It also notes that Māori entities already lead many place-based adaptation, resilience and environmental initiatives.
This points to connected levels of work. National monitoring needs consistency and an overview of progress, while international reporting brings an additional need for comparability. But adaptation is experienced and acted on in particular places. At that level, people need to know what reduced risk or improved resilience would mean in their catchment, community, rohe or council area, and what evidence would help them judge whether things are moving in that direction. The challenge is to connect these levels without losing the context that gives adaptation outcomes their meaning.
From outcomes to indicators
The Commission rarely uses the language of indicators or metrics in discussing this wider challenge. Its concern sits a step earlier: being clear about the outcomes adaptation is intended to achieve, linking those outcomes to risks and actions, and creating a basis for learning and adjustment.
The difficulty is not simply specifying indicators. It is specifying the outcomes first, in terms clear enough that meaningful indicators can then be developed at the appropriate scale.
Indicators and metrics are among the things that help ground this wider systems framing in place. An intervention logic can remain fairly abstract until someone asks what would count as evidence that the intended changes are happening. In a place-based setting, that means asking what people would expect to see, hear, measure or judge differently if adaptation were working.
It is quite possible to agree on measures before there is a shared understanding of what those measures are meant to tell us. Starting with candidate measures can pull attention towards data that are already available and things organisations already report, rather than first clarifying the outcomes being sought and how the system is expected to change.
That is also a familiar lesson from place-based indicator work: much of the important work happens before anyone starts choosing indicators. For example, the approach set out in Effective indicators for place-based initiatives starts with clarifying purpose, scope and scale, involving the right people, and developing a shared understanding of the system. Only then does it move to identifying possible indicators, selecting a small and useful set, and using them to support monitoring, evaluation and adaptive management.
Recent international guidance points in the same direction. The NAP Global Network’s 2026 practice brief Steps to Identify and Use Adaptation Indicators for National Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Systems also begins with clarifying adaptation objectives and expected results before identifying indicators. It advises countries to consider their national objectives, existing data systems and institutional arrangements, as well as how the information will be used. It also emphasises that indicator development depends on participation and institutional arrangements, not just technical choices.
Connecting monitoring, learning and place
The question of scale remains important. International frameworks can provide common reference points and national systems can provide consistency and overview, but useful adaptation indicators still need to make sense in the contexts where adaptation is taking place. Different perspectives and knowledge systems may need to be brought together, and not everything important can be reduced to a number. The issue is ultimately whether the evidence helps people understand what is changing and make decisions about what to do next.
None of this removes the need for nationally consistent monitoring or international reporting. The challenge is to connect those wider systems with the evidence and learning needed in particular places, without losing the context that gives adaptation outcomes their meaning.
In a changing climate, monitoring cannot only be about demonstrating progress after the event. It needs to help people see whether intended changes are occurring while there is still time to learn and adjust. The practical task, then, is to make risks and intended outcomes sufficiently explicit that useful evidence can be gathered, interpreted and brought back into the decisions that follow.
Related LfS resources: See also Adaptation under uncertainty: reflections on climate change overshoot and resilience for the wider systems context, and Effective indicators for place-based initiatives for practical guidance on developing and using indicators in collaborative, place-based settings. Related pages on developing indicators, evaluation and theory of change provide further approaches for linking intended outcomes, evidence, learning and decision-making.
