Page - (000028) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

health, incomeand food security.Additionally climate changeprogrammesaim to affect not just immediate outcomes but outcomes over generations. Last but not least, is theabsenceofdataandcapacity in thisarea–mostevaluatorsare trainedin more traditional sectors and hence think about evaluations in traditional ways. Indeed Picciotto (2007) identifies climate change as a significant challenge for development evaluation. Evaluating climate change action is a relatively new frontier for the field that has only emerged in the first decade of the 2000s (van denBergandFeinstein, 2009).Wemaintain that evaluation in thefieldofenviron- mentandsustainabledevelopmenthas theopportunity to leapfrog,whileborrowing from other disciplines, but also innovating to generate high quality and relevant evidence to inform national and international efforts directed at environment and sustainabledevelopment (Rowe2012;Uitto2014).This bookhas its origins in the Climate-Eval community of practice started and hosted by the Independent Eval- uationOfficeof theGEF.Thebookbrings togetherstate-of-the-art contributionsof evaluations pertaining to climate changepolicy,mitigation and adaptation. 1.2 BookStructure The book contains 18 chapters in which leading authors examine innovative and emerging evaluation knowledge and practice of climate change and its link to sustainable development. The authors discuss methodologies and approaches to better understand, learn fromandassess interventions, strategies andpolicies. The contributionsalsodiscussevaluationchallengesencounteredandlessons learned to better understand and tackle difficult areas of evaluation. Chapter 2 or overview chapter by Rob D. van den Berg and Lee Cando- Noordhuizen, ‘Action on climate change:What does it mean and where does it lead to?’ discusses the micro-macro paradox of climate change action. There is evidence thatclimateactionworksandachievesdirect impact–yetclimatechange seems unstoppable. An analysis of multiple comprehensive evaluations indicates that technology and knowledge are available to fight climate change. However, economicdevelopmentandsubsidiesharmful to theclimatestilloutweighremedial climate action with at least a factor of one hundred. Current successes of programmesandprojectswill not impact global trends unless unsustainable subsi- dies and actions are stopped. Chapter 3written byRobD.vandenBerg, ‘Mainstreaming impact evidence in climate change and sustainable development’ examines the demand for impact evidence and concludes that this demand goes beyond the experimental evidence that is produced during the lifetime of an intervention. Van den Berg argues for impact considerations to bemainstreamed throughout interventions, programmes and policies and for evaluations to gather evidence where available, rather than focusing the search for impact and itsmeasurements on one or two causalmech- anisms that are chosen for verification through experimentation. 1 EvaluatingClimateChangeAction forSustainableDevelopment: Introduction 7