A method for tracking national progress towards climate change adaptation

Adaptation tracking is now an important means to characterise, report, and monitor progress towards reducing vulnerability to climate change. The means and methods for adaptation tracking are challenging and diverse due to differing purposes and sectors and scales of analysis, difficulties in classifying activities as adaptation of one kind or another, and challenges in defining and measuring progress. Here we report on the approach and method used to develop the Australian Adaptation Database. With 900 adaptation activities coded, the database is a repository for learning from the efforts of others, helps to track progress in adaptation activities across all sectors and scales in Australia, and helps responsible authorities to meet reporting obligations. The paper describes the method to develop the database and focusses on an approach to assess progress in adaptation within and between sectors and jurisdictions. We propose adaptation progress is the degree to which adaptation activities move towards interventions that affect changes intended to reduce vulnerability. This approach enables adaptation stocktakes to infer progress from the nature of adaptation activities, with those that are closer to the ‘intervention’ stage being closer to reducing vulnerability than those that are precursors to intervention. Though the nature of adaptation makes all such exercises imperfect, the result, we propose, is a framework and method that serves the purposes of characterising, reporting, and monitoring progress towards adaptation within a country.