Page - (000350) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

German technical development cooperation agency on behalf of the FederalMin- istry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB)aswell as theFederalMinistry forEconomicCooperation andDevelop- ment (BMZ).Recently the topicsof ecosystem-basedadaptationandprivate sector adaptationhave been added to the site. Thewebsite has so far reached the highest amount of users during the UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties and currently peaksatmore than2,000accessesperday.Hosting theAdaptationM&ENavigator on AdaptationCommunity.net not only ensures high accessibility and a relevant audience, but also enables updates of the tool as newexperiences andpublications becomeavailable. 18.6 Limitations Asadecisionsupport tool, theAdaptationM&ENavigatormustbeconcise,easyto navigate, understandable to non-experts and applicable to a broad variety of contexts. It is therefore facinganumberof tradeoffs.First, it has to strike acareful balancebetweenbeingconcise andproviding sufficientdegreeofdetail.As shown inFig.18.1, the scopeof theAdaptationM&ENavigator is limited toprovidingan overviewofrelevantapproaches informofabriefdescription.Additionalguidance maybeneeded todesignand implement aparticular approach.Second, inorder to keep the approaches to a manageable number they have to be applicable to a relatively broad context and cannot account for every possible variation. As a result, the ratings provided for the three criteria of complexity, subjectivity and availableexperienceare indicativeonlyandcoulddeviate inpracticedependingon thedetails of implementation.Third, someof the specificM&Epurposes aremore suited to standardized M&E approaches than others. Practice has shown that national adaptationM&Esystems developed to date are diverse and very context dependent (EEA2015;Hammil et al. 2014a;Leiter 2013). Thus,whilst theAdap- tation M&E Navigator can point to a direction in regard to a suitable M&E approach, thedevelopmentof theactualM&Esystemmayrequireamorecomplex process (considerations for developing national adaptation M&E systems are outlined inLeiter (2013) andPrice-Kelly et al. (2015)). Furthermore,whilst therewasgeneralagreementonthecommonM&Epurposes featured in the Adaptation M&E Navigator, feedback by colleagues who commented on a draft version suggests that the purposes could be arranged in slightly differentways. For instance, ifmonitoring the implementation of projects (purpose #2)was broadened to includemonitoring of adaptation plans, thenmon- itoring theNational Adaptation Plan process (purpose #3) could be grouped as a special case under it.Nevertheless, itwasmaintained as a separate itemdue to its importance for countries under theUNFCCCnegotiations. Finally, as pointed out byFisher et al. (2015, p. 30): “Whatmakes amethodmost appropriate to climate changeadaptation isnotnecessarily its intrinsicqualities, (. . .),but insteadhowthe method is applied.” Thus, the decision support provided by theAdaptationM&E Navigator is only part of the total process that leads to an effective application of M&Efor adaptation to climate change (compareFig. 18.1). 338 T.Leiter