Page - (000045) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

emissions can bemeasured through technical processes, there is no similar mea- surement for adaptation.No single indicator for adaptationwill suffice.We argue that adaptation has at least three distinct dimensions: (1) changes in social and economic development that ensure that the outputs and outcomes are sustainable from a climate change perspective; (2) preparedness for and dealingwith natural disasters that may increase in intensity due to climate change; (3) resilience of populations and societies to tackle unexpected changes in thenatural environment that they are living in. The first dimension increasingly overlaps withmitigation action. While mitigation may be primarily directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, themicro-macroparadoxestablishes clearly that for these actions tobe ultimately successful, systems need to change and become environmentally sus- tainable. This is the route towards durable emission reductions, and it is also the route towards increasedadaptivecapacity.For this reasonweseean increasinguse of the same transformativemechanisms for adaptation as formitigation. Adaptation and mitigation are two different but linked dimensions in social, economicandenvironmentalsustainability.Adaptationconcerns theways inwhich the social and economic domains are “ready” for change in the environmental domain, and includes resulting actions.Mitigation focuses on one particular way society and the economyusenatural resources and aims tomake this use environ- mentally sustainable. Adaptation perspectives inmitigation often are termed “cli- mate proofing” of actions; ensuring that the mitigation interventions will be resilient against climate change.Both adaptation andmitigationultimately require action that transforms the interaction between the social, economic and environ- mentaldomains.Oneofusarguedthatsustainability is fundamentallyanadaptation issue (vandenBerg2014,p. 34–35): “achievinga sustainablebalanceamongcivil society, theeconomyand theenvironmentwill requireconstantadaptation”. In this lightwe includesomeof theevaluativeevidenceonadaptation inourdiscussionof transformative action. 2.5 ThreePriorityAreas forTransformativeAction The seven evaluations and their predecessors also providemuch information and evaluativeevidenceonhowtransformativeprocessescanbeset inmotionandwhat is essential for theseprocesses.Acoherentpictureemergesofactionat thecountry level, from civil society, the private sector and the government; action which requires legal and regulatory amendments and changes inmarkets and behaviour insociety;ofengagingwithcivil societywhichcollaboratesor is themainactor for behaviour change; of engaging with the private sector which introduces new solutions and technologies that could together with changed behaviour lead to market change and transformation.A crucial cross-cutting issue iswhether activ- ities take gender, equity and inclusiveness into account, as they are essential to ensure the transformationwill not just have an economic and environmental, but alsoasocial impact.For this reasonthenextsectionof thischapterdiscussesbriefly 24 R.D. vandenBerg andL.Cando-Noordhuizen