Tip sheet: Start tracking and evaluating your climate adaptation efforts

Monitoring, reporting and learning do not need to be complicated or costly. This tip sheet aims to offer practical guidance on how to get started on building a system that is manageable and meaningful for your community. It answers:

• How can we build a practical system for tracking adaptation progress?
• How do we make sure our monitoring and reporting efforts support continuous improvement? 

Getting started 

Tracking progress on your climate adaptation plan can help you understand what is working, where changes are needed and how much your efforts are reducing local climate risks over time. It also strengthens transparency and accountability by showing council, staff, partners and community members that your plan is being acted on.  

How do we track progress and learn along the way so our climate adaptation efforts stay effective over time?

Here are some tips to help you get started. 

Consider your audiences. 

Audiences for your climate adaptation efforts may include staff, council, members of the public, stakeholders, Indigenous communities or individuals and equity-deserving groups. Each of these audiences may need or want different types of information about progress on your plan. Thinking about your audiences’ information needs and interests early can help you focus your communications efforts to make sure monitoring and reporting is useful and accessible. For example:

Indigenous community members and equity-deserving groups are part of all the audience categories listed above. While many of the information needs listed in the follow examples may apply, no audience is the same—each may have distinct priorities, knowledge systems or protocols that shape what information they need and how it should be communicated.  

ICLEI’s Climate Communications Playbook: Behavioural Strategies for Community Action provides detailed guidance on how to better understand your audiences, their characteristics and the unique considerations that should inform communications.

Council

Potential information needs:

• high-level summaries

• alignment of climate adaptation actions with municipal priorities

• financial costs, benefits of adaptation actions and risks of inaction

To meet their needs, you could:

• Develop brief updates that can be shared in council reports or budget planning sessions.

• Include high-level summaries with key metrics and financial impacts.

Community members

Potential information needs:

• tangible and relatable information

• explicit connections to daily life or familiar places

To meet their needs, you could:

• Use storytelling, infographics, social media, community newsletters, Facebook groups.

Stakeholders and partners

Potential information needs:

• technical updates

• project-specific progress reports

• updates on collaboration opportunities

To meet their needs, you could:

• Present updates at regular meetings.

• Share formal reports and data summaries.

Municipal staff

Potential information needs:

• role-specific updates

• clear direction on what work needs to be done or on changes to existing work

To meet their needs, you could:

• Use internal dashboards.

• Provide all-staff updates through newsletters.

• Organize department meetings to share lessons-learned. 

Understand what you are looking for and how you will measure it. 

It is not realistic to track everything—nor is it needed. Focusing on a few key metrics that matter most to your community can help make sure your monitoring and reporting efforts are directed. Priority metrics should be:

• aligned with your climate adaptation goals (as outlined in your climate adaptation plan)
• feasible to collect information about given the resources (human and financial) available
• useful for your audiences and for decision making  

In general, it is helpful to monitor and report on two types of information: progress made implementing your climate adaptation plan (i.e., actions you’ve taken) and reduction of local climate risk (i.e., the impact your actions have had).

Progress on implementing your plan

This is about answering: are we doing what we said we would? What lessons have we learned along the way?

Here are some examples that can help you answer those questions:

Metrics

• number of climate adaptation actions completed, in progress or delayed
• percent of budget allocated to climate adaptation projects
• staff time spent on climate adaptation-related tasks

Monitoring tools

• a spreadsheet that mirrors your adaptation actions table in your climate adaptation plan
• project management tools your municipality already uses
• checklists or short progress forms filled by staff or department leads
• simple visual dashboards

Monitoring frequency

Depending on your context and capacity, you might choose:

• ongoing/regular monitoring built into staff role descriptions
• monthly check-ins (e.g., as part of existing team meetings)
• quarterly reviews (e.g., on the same timeline as budget updates or council reporting cycles)
• seasonal updates (e.g., after wildfire season or before summer)
• after key milestones (e.g., upon completion of a specific adaptation action)

Reporting frequency

Depending on the audience or type of information you are sharing, you might choose:

• quarterly updates to staff or working groups
• biannual reports to council and/or community members
• annual progress summaries through a “climate action year-in-review” newsletter
• as needed for funding reports or grant-related deliverables
• every 2-5 years as part of a review of your climate adaptation plan

Reduction of local climate risk

This is about answering: are our climate adaptation efforts having the intended or desired impacts? Might we need to change our approach?

This can be hard to measure directly, especially in the short term. How you answer this question will depend on how you assessed risks in the first place. However, answering these questions does not always require technical data, and useful signals can come from a range of sources. For example, you can gain insights into progress made on reducing climate risks from:

• conversations with staff or community members (e.g., “Compared to last year, there have been fewer road closures this year due to flooding.”)
• community climate surveys (e.g., surveys indicating the level of confidence community members have in the adequacy of wildfire responses)
• interviews or feedback from key partners (e.g., nurses and doctors at the local health-care centre providing information on heat-related health concerns)
• staff reports (e.g., data on the frequency or severity of service disruption) 

Empower staff for climate adaptation monitoring and reviewing. 

Assign clear roles and responsibilities.

Monitoring and reporting are more likely to succeed when roles and responsibilities are clearly assigned. To do this, clarify who is already responsible for or should be responsible for:

• collecting and analyzing the information
• summarizing and sharing the information

Build staff capacity.

You don’t need to be a climate expert to start monitoring adaptation progress. Tools, training and other supports can go a long way. For example:

Tools

• simple templates or checklists
• shared spreadsheets that link actions from our climate adaptation plan to responsible staff or departments
• reporting templates with prompts for lessons-learned

Training

• webinars or in-house sessions on what monitoring can look like
• peer-to-peer learning (e.g., staff showing other staff how they track information in their roles)
• collaboration with neighbouring municipalities for information sharing

Other supports

• partnerships with local universities or not-for-profits
• funding or grants for technical support
• summer or co-op student roles to set up systems
• qualified professionals 

Learn and adapt as you go. 

Monitoring is not just about tracking and reporting. It is also about learning. Building regular reflections into your municipality’s operations can help make sure you’re getting the most out of your monitoring efforts. Here are some examples of what you can do:

• Establish an annual reflection session with staff from different departments.
• Conduct debriefs at the end of climate adaptation projects.
• Develop a “learning log” where staff can record what worked or did not.
• Use monitoring insights to inform updates to your climate adaptation plan or priorities.

Examples of reflection questions that can help initiate conversation, build collective knowledge and support improvements over time include:

• What actions have had the most impact?
• What has been challenging? Why has it been challenging?
• Where has the outcome been different than what we expected?
• What instances have required us to adjust our plans or timelines?
• What lessons have we learned, and who could we share them with?
• What successes are we proud of, and who could we share them with? 

Next steps

Explore the Climate-Ready Communities Assessment Tool for additional insight and support in implementing your climate risk assessment and adaptation plan. You can use the tool to evaluate your existing climate adaptation efforts, pinpoint areas for improvement and chart a clear plan for strengthening your community’s adaptation efforts.