Page - (000041) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

rapid transport systems and road projects, where especially the former have con- tributed to greenhouse gas emissions. However, a lack of clear classification of climate change related activities and investments, as well as the lack of a transparent measurement system for green- housegasemissionreductions,causedconsiderabledifficulties inidentifyingwhich projectsandloansof theBankwereof relevancefor itsclimatechangestrategyand howmuch they contributed. The IDB climate change strategy was approved in 2011 to bring activities together that are relevant for climate change and to approach them in amore systematicway, to enablemainstreaming andupscaling. While the activities themselves have considerable history in the IDB, their rela- tionship to climate changegoalshasbeen relatively recent.Thebenefit of anolder portfolio is that itenablesa lookatfinishedprojects,evenif thismeansextraefforts to reconstruct what its specific contribution to climate change mitigation was. Compared to theCIF evaluation, the IDBevaluation is able to provide evaluative evidence on effectiveness, though longer term impact remains elusive due to measurement problems (IDB2014, p. x).The IndependentEvaluationDepartment of theAsianDevelopmentBank in its real-timeevaluationof theADB’s initiatives tosupportaccess toclimatefinancealsonotedthedifficultyofassessingtheclimate impact of activities that may have other primary objectives and the lack of a consistent framework for measuring greenhouse gas emission reductions (ADB/IED2014, p. xi). The evaluation of theSwiss InternationalCooperation inClimateChange from 2000 to 2012 develops the same argument for the portfolio of interventions it looked at. The focus on climate change is relatively new in Swiss cooperation, andmany of the older projects were formulated and implemented from develop- ment and poverty alleviation perspectives. As a result, no consistent data sets are available tomeasure the impact of especially the earlier interventions on climate change(GaiaConsulting2014,p.9).Yet theportfolioscoreshighoneffectiveness, showing “moderate to strong” effectiveness in reducinggreenhouse gas emissions and increasing people’s abilities to cope with the impacts of climate change (Ibidem, p. 5).Due to themethodological challenges in evaluating a portfolio that emergedfromotherobjectives,but isnowseenascentral toclimatechangeefforts, theevaluation is reduced tonoting that thereare“numerousexamplesofsuccessful emission reductions” but nooverall picture emerging. Norway’s support to Reducing Emissions fromDeforestation and Forest Deg- radation (REDDþ) throughNorway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI)hasbeenevaluated in2013inasummativeevaluation, lookingatwhathad been achieved so far. This support has similaritieswith theCIFs in that funding is aimedtoachieveimpact throughfocusingonafewcountries, sothat theamountsof fundingbecomecatalytic.Theevaluationconcludes that theportfolio is“providing a substantial, direct contribution towards the conservationofnatural forests” (LTS International et al. 2014, p. xxii), and that it is “likely” that thiswill lead tohigher level and long term impact, as the supported activities contribute to “sustainable development”(LTS,p.xxiv).Yet thiswouldbedependentonfuturefunding,which is uncertain – it is this lack of certainty that the evaluation proclaims to be the 20 R.D. vandenBerg andL.Cando-Noordhuizen