Page - (000010) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

Preface Climate change is one of the preeminent challenges facing the world today. The consequences of climate changemanifest themselves inmultipleways, including increasedvariabilityand intensityofextremeweathereventsandsea level rise.We arealreadyseeingtheimpactsofclimatechange,andthefirstones tofeel themtend to be poor people and poor countries that aremost vulnerable and have the least capacities to copewith them. The search for solutions tomitigate climate change and to adapt to its consequences is urgent. Rigorous evaluation of policies, pro- grams, and projects can help the international community to identify technical solutions, economic strategies, and social innovations that improve our ability to dealwith climate change.This is the focus of thepresent book. Thebookhas its genesis in theClimate-EvalCommunity ofPractice hosted by the Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility. Its over- archinggoal is toestablishstandardsandnorms,supportcapacitydevelopment,and share good practices in evaluations of climate change and development. In November2014,Climate-Evalwith itspartnersorganized theSecondInternational Conference on Evaluating Climate Change and Development in Washington, D.C. The aimof this eventwas to promote an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas andmethods to evaluate climate change and sustainable development. This 3-day event brought together some300 leadingexperts andpolicymakers in thefieldand included sessions on climate changemitigation, adaptation, and policy, aswell as special sessionssuchaspaneldiscussionsandroundtables.Topicsdiscussedranged from theory of change approaches to evaluation and institutional capacity; to disaster risk reduction, resilience, and tracking adaptation; to monitoring and evaluation of ecosystem-based and natural resource management interventions and climate change funds. EvaluatingClimateChangeAction for SustainableDevelopmentbuilds upon a selection of themost relevant and practical papers and presentations given at the 2014 conference. Following the conference, the editors and the authors worked closely together to develop the presentations into a coherent set of articles orga- nized around the three main themes of climate change evaluation: policy, xi