Countries left the Bonn Climate Change Conference last week without an agreement on issues related to the global goal on adaptation. This stalemate was partly due to disagreement among countries over the next steps and the composition of a task force to improve the Belém Adaptation Indicators (BAIs), the 59 voluntary indicators adopted at the 30th UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30). With negotiations stalled until COP 31, there is nonetheless an invitation from COP 30 for countries to test the BAIs and contribute their experiences for the Belém-Addis vision on adaptation, which runs until COP 32.
This is why it’s more important than ever for countries to strengthen their national monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems, including indicators that can help assess the progress of their adaptation actions.
Indicators are a key source of information for national progress reports, Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs), Adaptation Communications, and National Communications, which, in turn, are an important source of evidence to inform the second global stocktake, which will assess collective progress on adaptation. All these reporting mechanisms depend on national MEL systems that can track what is working, how, and for whom. Countries that build strong, nationally owned MEL systems now will be better equipped to contribute to the second round of BTRs due at the end of 2026. This momentum reinforces the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate Resilience (UAE FGCR) target for all countries to have designed, established, and operationalized national MEL systems by 2030.
Our new practice brief, Steps to Identify and Use Adaptation Indicators for National Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Systems, offers a clear answer through eight practical steps, including clarifying adaptation objectives, analyzing results, and balancing national priorities with global reporting.
In this article, we present six key takeaways to guide countries in identifying and using adaptation indicators as part of their national MEL systems.
The Challenge: Connecting national systems to global frameworks
The UAE FGCR reporting architecture and the BAI create real incentives for countries to strengthen their national MEL systems, with adaptation indicators as a critical component. Indicators play a key role in MEL systems by providing continuous and structured data that governments can use to track whether changes are occurring as a result of policies and actions. Before feeding into global processes, however, MEL systems and their indicators serve a more fundamental national purpose: assessing whether adaptation actions are effective, for whom, and under what conditions, then generating the evidence needed to adjust course.
There is a risk of getting the sequencing wrong by designing indicator systems around global templates rather than national adaptation realities. The BAIs are voluntary and country-driven: not all 59 will be relevant in every context, and countries are not expected to adopt them wholesale. In this report, we discuss how to ground indicators in national contexts while aligning with global frameworks.
Six Key Takeaways for Effective Adaptation Indicators
The brief translates extensive country experience and technical guidance into eight practical steps covering the full design and operationalization of MEL systems for national adaptation plan (NAP) processes.
Here are six key takeaways for implementing effective adaptation indicators:
- Adaptation indicators are only as useful as the MEL system in which they sit. A small number of well-designed indicators, embedded in reporting and learning processes to inform decisions, will generate more useful evidence than a large set that stretches national capacity.
- Indicator selection should consider national contexts first—NAP objectives, existing data systems, and institutional realities—and align with global frameworks after. This means countries should take the time to consider which BAIs are useful or not, and to contextualize them according to their national circumstances.
- Designing indicators is as much an institutional process as a technical one. Ministries, local authorities, civil society, and communities must be involved from the outset to avoid undermining their use. Integrating gender equity and social inclusion considerations and disaggregation from the outset is critical.
- A mix of indicator types is essential. Process and results indicators, quantitative and qualitative measures, and contextual climate parameters are all needed to capture what is changing, for whom, and under what conditions. Countries should consider how to capture outcome-level results, while ensuring these indicators can realistically be populated and are not just aspirational.
- Indicators must be piloted and validated with key stakeholders before full rollout. Engaging with the actors that are involved in the indicator, testing them, learning from the experience, and refining before scaling is consistently more effective—and less costly—than attempting system-wide implementation from the outset.
- An indicator system needs regular review aligned with NAP process reviews to ensure indicators remain relevant, data quality is sufficient, and findings are actually used to improve adaptation decisions. Indicators must reflect the changing realities under which adaptation actions unfold, rather than dictating what gets measured and what should be prioritized.
What This Means for the Road to COP 32
Communicating and reporting adaptation progress is not just a transparency obligation. It is an opportunity for countries to document and communicate the depth of their adaptation efforts. This evidence base also enables countries to attract resources to scale up actions that have worked.
The UAE FGCR target of operational MEL systems for all parties by 2030 is ambitious. It will not be met by importing a global indicator set. It will be met by countries building systems that work in their contexts, informed by frameworks like the BAI where they are relevant, and sustained by the institutional arrangements, data systems, and review processes that make indicators useful in practice.
What a country chooses to measure, and how it builds the systems to measure it, is where that evidence and that story begins. It is from these national foundations that the global stocktake can draw its assessment of where countries collectively stand on adaptation.
Read the practice brief Steps to Identify and Use Adaptation Indicators for National Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Systems. This is part of a series of practice briefs complementing the NAP GN’s Toolkit for Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning for NAP Processes, developed in collaboration with the Adaptation Committee.