Introduction to Adaptation in the Global Stocktake

In 2015, the Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal for the world to urgently respond to climate change and its increasingly devastating impacts. Countries agreed to an iterative cycle of planning, implementation, and review at both the national and international levels. The Global Stocktake (GST) is an integral part of the Paris Agreement that assesses the collective progress countries have made to implement the Paris Agreement and achieve the long-term goals on mitigation and adaptation. It serves an important role in helping the parties to the Paris Agreement understand where we are in terms of climate action, where we want to go, and how we get there, with the ultimate aim of informing the parties’ updates to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every 5 years.

While the first GST is underway, there are still many uncertainties due to the “learning-by-doing” approach, and the complex nature of this review and assessment mechanism poses challenges for the meaningful engagement and participation of parties and other stakeholders within the process. This brief aims to provide policy-makers and practitioners from Small Island Developing States and the least-developed countries who work on adaptation planning processes with an introduction to the GST process. It seeks to demystify the global progress assessment and ambition-raising mechanism, with a focus on its adaptation component. It also briefly discusses how to leverage monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) for national adaptation and countries’ National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and Adaptation Communication (AdCom) processes to inform the GST.