Tracking adaptation and resilience progress is increasingly urgent given that negative impacts of climate change continue to severely affect ecosystems and the livelihoods of the most vulnerable. However, there are a number of challenges related to the assessment of climate change adaptation, adaptation co-benefits and resilience in the agricultural sectors:

• Adaptation is country specific and cross-sectoral. There is no harmonized system (methods and indicators) in place to assess adaptation in general.
• Current approaches are mainly based on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks for country-level reporting or to evaluate funding accountability requirements for project proposals under the Financial Mechanism.
• Existing local and national adaptation M&E systems measure different aspects of adaptation and their results are generally not directly comparable and do not lend themselves to globally standardized indicators.
• Adaptation co-benefits are mostly qualitative which makes them difficult to measure. They can range from quality of income, technology development and capacity building to improved gender equity, soil health and increased biodiversity The objectives, scopes and purposes for assessing adaptation at local, national and global levels are constantly evolving. 

What FAO is doing

FAO continues to support member states as they advance on their national level M&E frameworks to measure different aspects of adaptation and resilience processes and outcomes. 

• FAO supports countries to collect agricultural data on adaptation and resilience from national sources, validating and harmonizing them, estimating regional and global aggregates as part of its ongoing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators custodianship role.  
• FAO proposes to develop a coherent indicator framework to monitor progress towards the targets that countries have set in adaptation, adaptation co-benefits and resilience, as part of the overarching 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement. 

Key Koronivia publications & documents

• FAO submission on topics 2(b) and 2(c)
• Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture: Analysis of submissions on topics 2(b) and 2(c)
• FAO summary of  Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture UNFCCC workshop on topic 2(b)