Highlights

• The adaptation components of countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement are voluntary, and the agreement has not provided guidance for their development.
• This working paper compares both the first and updated NDCs of 86 countries, analyzing changes in their adaptation components.
• About half of both rounds of analyzed NDCs include an adaptation component, with updated submissions including more adaptation components and more detailed actions, suggesting that countries are increasingly viewing adaptation as an important element.
• The analysis highlights the need for improved guidance on including adaptation in the NDCs, increased clarity about the goals and objectives of countries’ adaptation components, and support for investment and implementation plans for prioritized adaptation actions.
• This paper contributes to a growing literature on adaptation ambition and assessment, and it offers findings that can be used by donors, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and country governments to assess the current state of adaptation ambition and improve the adaptation components of future NDCs.

Introduction

Nationally determined contributions are a core obligation of the Parties to the Paris Agreement. Pursuant of Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement, Parties have committed to prepare, communicate, and maintain successive NDCs with their domestic goals for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (UNFCCC 2015a). Many countries also voluntarily include adaptation in their NDCs as an imperative part of climate action in pursuit of the Global Goal on Adaptation. The Paris Agreement provides some guidance on how countries may provide NDC mitigation information and establishes a basis for adaptation planning outside of the NDCs through the national adaptation plan (NAP) process. However, it leaves countries free to choose how they want to present adaptation information in their NDCs. Existing guidelines for other instruments may be applied to NDC adaptation components, such as Decision 9/CMA.1 for adaptation communications, but designated guidance remains lacking. The decision to voluntarily include adaptation in the NDCs is politically salient because Parties remain divided on whether the component should be a core element of these documents or should remain in separate instruments.

Parties to the Paris Agreement commit to a five-year NDC enhancement cycle, with the expectation that they will ratchet up ambition over time. Ambition in mitigating GHG emissions can be measured through quantitative reductions in emissions. Yet understanding and assessing ambition in adaptation is not easy: no agreed quantitative or qualitative indicators exist for assessing reductions in vulnerability, increases in resilience, or enhanced adaptive capacity. This complexity in measurement has prevented the establishment of a common definition for the term adaptation ambition. Despite lacking clear metrics, adaptation ambition remains crucial to protect the most vulnerable as climate change impacts intensify.

Understanding what countries are including in the adaptation component of their NDCs is a critical step toward fully assessing and increasing adaptation ambition. Tracking the adaptation component of each country’s NDC and how it is changing over each NDC submission cycle can help inform how countries are tackling climate change adaptation and what types of additional support may be needed.

About This Working Paper

This working paper presents the findings from a comprehensive assessment of the adaptation components of the 86 updated NDCs submitted by the end of June 2021.¹ The assessment also includes the first NDCs as well as NAP documents submitted by these 86 countries to the UNFCCC until the end of June 2021. Although only 9 of the 86 Parties had submitted NAPs, they were included in the analysis as important complements to the NDCs because they often expand on and operationalize NDC adaptation commitments. Countries that had only submitted their first NDCs by the end of June 2021 were excluded from analysis. This paper uses the term updated NDC to refer to both updated first and second NDCs submitted to the UNFCCC that are included in the analysis. The assessment is built on past World Resources Institute (WRI) work on NDC enhancement, the Global Commission on Adaptation’s work that put forward a bold agenda on adaptation, and guidance from the UNFCCC on adaptation reporting (Bapna et al. 2019; Fransen et al. 2019; UNFCCC 2015b).

This paper does not judge how well each country has enhanced its adaptation NDC. Assessing whether the prioritized actions in a country’s NDC will be sufficient to fully address climate change vulnerabilities and impacts is challenging—and their effectiveness will also depend on implementation. This paper instead seeks to identify trends between the first and updated submissions of NDC adaptation components and build a framework for assessing adaptation ambition. All NDC documents used in the analysis can be found on the UNFCCC NDC Registry (UNFCCC 2021b), and the data produced in this assessment is publicly available on the Climate Watch data platform (www.climatewatchdata.org).

The findings from this paper will be useful to bilateral and multilateral donors, the UNFCCC, and the Parties to the Paris Agreement. Donors may be able to use this analysis in conjunction with other adaptation instruments to tailor technical, capacity building, and financial assistance to support adaptation priorities communicated in updated NDCs. The UNFCCC—and, in particular, the Adaptation Committee—can use this analysis to help guide the development of different adaptation instruments. And finally, Parties can use the analysis to better understand how different countries are progressing toward increased adaptation ambition, and they can learn from each other.

Assessing Adaptation Ambition

To help fill the void in establishing standard quantitative metrics for adaptation, this paper presents a set of qualitative criteria for assessing NDC adaptation ambition. The paper breaks down the question of adaptation ambition of the NDCs into the following nine categories:

1. Country ownership
2. Alignment with planning exercises and other adaptation plans and policies
3. Use of latest impact, risk, and vulnerability information
4. Focus on critical adaptation systems as identified in the Global Commission on Adaptation’s Adapt Now report
5. Presence of additional information for priority actions, such as baselines, time frames, and costs
6. Clarity about monitoring and evaluation approaches
7. Commitments to social inclusion, gender, and equity
8. References to losses and damages from climate change
9. Evidence of transformative adaptation in the prioritized actions

The assessment framework used to analyze the adaptation components of the NDCs includes four sections, which address the nine elements identified above:

• Elements of adaptation communications: The first section includes questions based on guidance found in the annex of Decision 9/CMA.1 for adaptation communications (UNFCCC 2015b). Adaptation communications are a different instrument for adaptation reporting under the Paris Agreement, but the guidance for adaptation communications is still relevant for adaptation NDCs. Links between these two instruments are especially pertinent because Parties to the Paris Agreement have the option to use their NDCs as a vehicle for reporting adaptation communications. This component addresses Elements 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 of the adaptation ambition criteria, relating to ownership, alignment, information, monitoring and evaluation, and equity.
• Critical systems and sectors in adaptation priorities: The second section categorizes prioritized adaptation actions based on the critical systems that the Global Commission on Adaptation identified in its flagship report (Bapna et al. 2019). This component addresses Elements 4 and 5 of the ambition criteria, which concern issues related to information about priority actions.
• Losses and damages: The third section addresses Element 8 of the ambition criteria by assessing how issues related to losses and damages² from climate change are addressed in the NDC. It is based on the work plan of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage.
• Transformative adaptation: The final section addresses Element 9 of the ambition criteria and assesses whether countries are including actions that could be identified as transformative adaptation, based on WRI work (Carter et al. 2018).³

Key Findings

Our key findings are summarized in Table ES-1. More detailed results of the analysis can be found in Section 3.

Reflections for Further Action

For Country Governments

• Countries should strengthen links between NDCs and other adaptation plans and processes. Improved synergies with the NAP process and adaptation communications could work to improve international visibility for adaptation and advance implementation on the national level.
• Countries should ensure that their adaptation NDCs are strategically aligned with other adaptation instruments under the Paris Agreement. Including adaptation as part of the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) and integrating ongoing adaptation monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) efforts can support tracking of adaptation NDC implementation.
• Countries should engage a wide variety of stakeholders throughout NDC development to ensure inclusive adaptation priorities that meet the needs of the most vulnerable.

For Bilateral and Multilateral Donors

• Climate change will impact all sections of society. In addition to investments in critical systems such as food and nutrition security, nature-based solutions, and water, donors should invest in integrating climate adaptation into less prioritized systems, such as cities and urban areas, locally led adaptation, adaptation financing, and human health.
• Donors should support work on linking the adaptation elements of the Paris Agreement’s ETF with development of national adaptation MEL systems.
• Donors should support developing countries to implement the adaptation efforts identified in their NDCs by assisting with the creation of investment and implementation plans, reinforcing links to existing national plans and NAPs when available, and further refining MEL frameworks.
• Donors should support national governments in their efforts to minimize, avert, and address climate change–related losses and damages. Supporting comprehensive climate risk management approaches is a strong entry point for this work.
• Though transformative adaptation is critical to respond to present and future climate change impacts, many national governments do not yet explicitly address this in their adaptation NDCs. Donors could help build the capacities of national institutions to drive this agenda.

For the UNFCCC

• Develop improved NDC adaptation guidance for the Parties. Currently, the information that should be included in the various adaptation instruments under the Paris Agreement, particularly NDC adaptation components, is not clear. The Adaptation Committee is already developing supplementary guidance on adaptation communications to help address this gap, and such guidance should map out information needs and synergies between adaptation instruments.
• Improve the details on adaptation included in the annual NDC synthesis reports. By indicating what has changed since the previous round of NDCs, the secretariat could facilitate a process for sharing and learning and could support increased ambition in the NDC enhancement cycle.

The assessment framework, described in detail in Appendix A and used to analyze the adaptation components of NDCs, comprises four sections:

• Elements of adaptation communications: The first section is based on guidance from the UNFCCC found in the annex to Decision 9/CMA.1 for the development of the adaptation communications. The adaptation communication is a different instrument than the NDC but is explicitly linked to NDCs in the Paris Agreement through Article 7.11. Its guidance is still relevant for assessing the NDC adaptation components. In fact, the adaptation component of the NDC can serve as the adaptation communication if a country wishes.
• Critical systems and sectors in adaptation priorities: The second section of the framework categorizes the priority adaptation actions in the NDCs using categories developed by the Global Commission on Adaptation’s Adapt Now report (Bapna et al. 2019): food and nutrition security, nature-based solutions, water, cities and urban areas, infrastructure, disaster risk management, and financing adaptation. The authors added human health, locally led adaptation, and an “other” category to the list of Adapt Now critical system categories. The “other” category was added to capture hard-to-categorize priorities (Bapna et al. 2019). Each adaptation action was also categorized using traditional economic sectors and subsectors to help cross-reference them with the Adapt Now categories. 
• Losses and damages: The third section assesses how countries referenced losses and damages⁴ from climate change in their NDCs. Losses and damages from climate change are part of the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2015a) and refer to averting, minimizing, and addressing losses and damages associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather and slow-onset events. The questions for this section were based on the work plan of the UNFCCC’s Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (WIM Excom 2019b). They include mention of Loss and Damage (L&D) as well as economic and noneconomic costs. The framework also checks whether the NDCs mention slow-onset events, displacement and climate migration, and comprehensive risk management and insurance. 
• Transformative adaptation: The final section identifies transformative adaptation priorities. The questions for assessing this were based on WRI’s work on transformative adaptation (Carter et al. 2018, 2021; Ferdinand et al. 2020) that identified transformative adaptation actions in the food and nutrition security thematic area in the first NDCs. The authors broke down transformative adaptation as actions that seek to create systemic change through an expansion in scale, through innovation, or through a shift in location in response to climate change (Carter et al. 2018). Though there are connections between transformative adaptation and efforts to minimize, avert, and address losses and damages from climate change, this assessment did not identify overlaps between the two.

The trends presented in this section are findings from the analysis of the NDCs of 86 countries that had submitted updated NDCs by the end of June 2021. They do not include data from more recent submissions or from the first NDCs of countries that had not submitted an update by the end of June 2021.

Most non–Annex 1 (i.e., developing) countries have included an adaptation component in their updated NDCs, but most Annex 1 (i.e., developed) countries have not. European Union countries that did not include an adaptation component in their first or updated NDC influenced this trend. Of the 86 countries assessed, 46 first NDCs and 48 updated NDCs contained an adaptation component. Countries that did not include adaptation in their first NDCs, including Andorra, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Montenegro, and North Macedonia (UNFCCC 2021b) have included an adaptation component in their updated NDCs, reflecting their desire to elevate the priority of adaptation alongside mitigation. However, some countries that included adaptation in their first NDCs have not included it in their updated NDCs. These countries, including Brazil, Grenada, and the Marshall Islands, either refer to their NAPs or include plans for communicating adaptation information to the UNFCCC through a different instrument, such as an adaptation communication (UNFCCC 2021b).

There is diversity in how adaptation is included in NDCs. The inclusion of adaptation in the NDCs remains voluntary, and the UNFCCC has provided no guidance to Parties on how they can structure and develop the adaptation components of their NDCs. Some NDCs include comprehensive information related to national circumstances, adaptation planning, and adaptation implementation, but others do not. For instance, some present only a table of prioritized adaptation actions with limited associated information.

Most countries do not link the adaptation components of NDCs to the adaptation communications. Although countries such as Argentina, Colombia, and Kenya reference such links (UNFCCC 2021b), they account for only 8 countries among the 86 assessed that note that the adaptation components of their NDCs are the sole component of their adaptation communications, and 78 countries do not. The rest either make no mention of adaptation communications or explicitly state that the NDC components are different from adaptation communications. By the end of June 2021, only 16 countries had submitted adaptation communications. Unless countries are clear about the objective of each adaptation instrument under the Paris Agreement, it is highly probable that the same adaptation information could be repeated across different instruments. Though this could reflect improved coordination of adaptation information, it could also lead to duplicated effort or the sharing of contradictory information across different instruments.

Country Ownership and the NDC Development Process

Most first- and second-round NDCs describe the process of developing their NDCs, with richer descriptions provided in the updated NDCs. Sixty-three first NDCs and 74 updated NDCs included descriptions of the process the countries followed to develop their NDCs, including the institutions involved, the stakeholders consulted, and the way the NDC was approved. In general, the updated NDCs included more details about national institutional arrangements to advance climate action. In the updated NDCs, Fiji and Honduras, among others, reported stronger engagement of government agencies and line ministries (UNFCCC 2021b). Many countries also mentioned additional stakeholder groups they consulted during NDC development, resulting in more inclusive adaptation targets and actions. Figure 1 breaks down the number of times the NDCs mention engaging with a particular group. Updated NDCs were either approved through a cabinet decision or through another high-level political body, which was not always the case with the first NDCs. High levels of engagement and coordination during development, as well as political buy-in due to endorsement through a cabinet decision, implies that government and societal ownership and awareness of the updated NDCs is higher than for the first round of NDCs.

In contrast, only 23 first NDCs and 28 updated NDCs provided separate descriptions of how countries developed the adaptation components. Often the teams involved in NDC adaptation development are not the same as those involved in mitigation, though they may be from the same government agency. The types and nature of stakeholders that need to be consulted are also very different for adaptation. Where provided, descriptions of the adaptation development process included additional details, such as references to future plans for enhancing NDC adaptation components, plans for the development of an adaptation communication, or for the completion of the country’s NAP process.

Alignment with Other Plans and Policies

Compared to first NDCs, more updated NDCs explain how countries have aligned the adaptation component with other national and sectoral plans and policies. The updated NDCs include more references to other national, sectoral, and subnational plans and policies. Updated NDCs, such as those for Colombia and the Dominican Republic, often include the NAP, other national climate change policies and plans, sectoral plans, and national economic development plans (UNFCCC 2021b). Figure 2 shows the number of times the adaptation components of the NDCs refer to national, sectoral, economic development, or subnational plans and policies.

The NAP process, whether in progress or completed, seems to drive many elements of the adaptation component of NDCs (Dazé et al. 2018; Noble 2018; Smithers et al. 2017). Significantly, when compared to first-round NDCs, more updated NDCs refer to their country’s NAP process—completed or ongoing—as influencing the adaptation NDCs. The NAP process is a much more comprehensive national adaptation planning process because it enables countries to “identify and address their medium- and long-term priorities for adapting to climate change” (Hammill et al. 2019). The NAP documents reviewed for this assessment, for example, provide more detailed information about climate hazards, vulnerabilities, and risks; institutional arrangements; vertical and horizontal coordination; and sectoral adaptation processes and priorities than the NDCs. The numerical difference in prioritized adaptation actions between NDCs and NAPs illustrates the comprehensive nature of NAPs as a planning instrument. The nine NAP documents identified an average of 98 adaptation priority actions, whereas the first NDCs averaged 10 and the updated NDCs averaged 12 prioritized adaptation actions.

Updated NDCs make more references to other international conventions and frameworks. These references indicate that countries see the NDCs as connected to other international processes, not just the UNFCCC (Singh et al. 2016; Smithers et al. 2017; UNFCCC 2021a). Many updated NDCs refer to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in particular, with some countries presenting detailed mapping to the SDGs. There are also references to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Ramsar Convention. However, these references lack detail, and NDCs do not include information detailing the exact links.

Information about Climate Impacts, Risks, and Vulnerabilities

Countries have used information from their latest national communications and other recent assessments to present information related to climate change impacts in their updated NDCs. Impacts are driven by changes in rainfall patterns and temperature, increases in sea level, ocean acidification, increased frequency and intensity of hydrometeorological events, and loss of water reserves. Including this information in the updated NDCs reflects the increasing urgency of climate change due to growing severity and frequency of short-, medium-, and long-term impacts. For example, Panama has significantly increased the details surrounding climate change trends and impacts in its updated NDC (UNFCCC 2021b).

Updated NDCs more frequently identify specific population groups that are more vulnerable to climate change impacts. A number of specific population groups are identified, with women, children, and the elderly noted as being particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Figure 3).

Prioritized Adaptation Actions

Countries in this assessment have included a wide range of prioritized adaptation actions in their NDCs. Of the 48 countries that include an adaptation component in their updated NDCs, a majority (39) include a list of prioritized actions. Some of these actions are broad descriptions of strategic intent or overarching program work; others set out intended actions and activities. The authors found that priorities in the NDCs map well against the core Adapt Now report’s critical systems.

The number of adaptation priorities has increased in the updated NDCs. There is a notable increase in adaptation priorities related to advancing nature-based solutions across all updated NDCs, with a focus on embedding nature-based solutions in adaptation planning and policy. The number of priorities related to water, food and nutrition security, cities and urban areas (mainstreaming climate risks into service delivery), infrastructure (inclusive climate-informed planning), human health, financing adaptation (scaling and deploying public finance effectively), and locally led adaptation has also increased. However, the number of actions relating to cities and urban areas, locally led adaptation, financing adaptation, and human health is relatively low in both the first and updated NDCs. Figure 4 shows the breakdown of all prioritized adaptation actions found in the first and updated NDCs, organized according to the Adapt Now critical systems.

More than 100 adaptation priorities in the first NDCs and 165 priorities in the updated NDCs did not fall within the Adapt Now critical systems and were categorized by the authors as “other.” By cross-referencing “other” priorities with traditional economic sectors, we found that most were related to cross-cutting issues such as capacity building and knowledge transfer, economy-wide considerations, and investments in climate services, education, social development, tourism, and energy. These activities were missing in the Adapt Now report’s articulation of critical systems for adaptation.

The increase in adaptation priorities across updated NDCs was not evenly distributed across all countries assessed. A few countries that have significantly increased the number of adaptation actions in their updated NDCs drive most of the increase. Others have actually decreased the number of priorities between their first NDC and updated NDC (Table 1). The number of priorities per NDC alone may not be an appropriate indicator for assessing increased adaptation ambition because a deeper assessment is needed to understand the nature of such changes.

The change in the number of priorities may be due to many factors. For example, some countries may decide to consolidate and focus their activities for strategic reasons or because they have completed a NAP that covers adaptation actions in detail. It is important to look at the intent and synergies of each action and assess how countries are aiming to build resilience across their critical sectors. But assessing intent is not possible from the review of the NDC documents alone, which do not include much information. The data on the Climate Watch platform and in Appendix C of this paper list the number of prioritized adaptation actions in all NDCs by country, categorized according to the critical systems of the Adapt Now report (Bapna et al. 2019) and allow comparison of national actions.

Implementing Prioritized Adaptation Actions

Even though the number of actions with indicators, baselines, targets, and specified time frames has increased in the updated NDCs, they account for a relatively small fraction of the total number of adaptation actions. This suggests that although the NDCs are a good indicator of adaptation priorities, more work is necessary to get them ready for implementation. Implementation action may take the form of supporting NDC implementation plans or integrating NDC actions into other planning processes, such as the NAP, where their increasing ambition can be supported by the NDC Partnership (NDC Partnership 2017). Figure 5 breaks down prioritized adaptation actions in the NDCs, according to their level of specificity.

The 86 countries included in this analysis reported a major increase in the total costs of prioritized actions between their first and updated NDCs. Increases are reported for both conditional actions not possible without external financing and unconditional actions to which countries are committed regardless of the availability of external financing. More countries have also included costs for prioritized actions. Figure 6 shows the number of NDCs that include cost estimates, and Table 2 provides a sum of the total costs for conditional and unconditional actions identified in the NDCs.

However, there are some concerns with these figures: the number of analyzed countries that include cost figures for their adaptation priorities is low (only 22 countries of the 86 assessed), the method used to calculate these costs is not described, and the costs stated are for different time periods. It is also not clear why cost estimates have increased—whether they are driven by greater adaptation need or more robust calculations. These concerns mean that summing up the cost figures available may not provide a full or accurate picture of adaptation needs. The availability of adaptation finance also still lags behind mitigation finance despite growing needs.

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning of Adaptation

There is a slight increase in the number of countries that included information about how they will monitor and evaluate the adaptation component of their updated NDCs, but this number is still less than half of all countries that include an adaptation component in their NDC. Most of the countries that include information on adaptation monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) mention work under way to develop a MEL system to track progress of NDC implementation (Figure 7). In part, this is driven by the need to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement as part of the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF). Rwanda, for example, has communicated significantly greater details on adaptation MEL in its updated NDC (UNFCCC 2021b).

The inclusion of adaptation information in NDCs remains voluntary, so countries have a lot of flexibility in how they set up a MEL system to track implementation progress. Moreover, adaptation MEL remains complex. Some countries mention plans to link the NDC tracking system with national-level adaptation MEL systems already in place or in development (AC 2021). The alignment and integration of these two approaches for adaptation MEL is critical for improving adaptation ambition over time.

Inclusion of Gender, Indigenous Peoples, and Local Knowledge

Updated NDCs show a considerable increase in their integration of gender. More countries are taking steps to address equal participation and influence of women in decision-making and ensure that allocation of resources and benefits addresses gender inequality. They have also started including gender equality and women’s empowerment in adaptation MEL processes. Other recent assessments of NDCs have also shown that gender integration has improved in the updated documents (CARE 2020b; IUCN 2021; NDC Partnership 2020a). Figure 8 shows the indicators used in this assessment to track how gender equality is integrated across the adaptation component in particular.

The updated NDCs reflect more inclusion of indigenous communities and local knowledge. Updated NDCs make more references to inclusion of indigenous groups and local knowledge; support for their rights, agency, and governance systems; and preservation of indigenous and local knowledge systems (Figure 9). Although only a few NDCs refer to preserving rights to self-determination, five countries make the commitment as part of the adaptation component of their updated NDCs. Countries such as Cambodia and Nicaragua show increased commitments to gender integration and the inclusion of indigenous communities in their updated NDCs (UNFCCC 2021b).

Losses and Damages from Climate Change in the NDCs

Fewer updated NDCs reflect the economic costs of extreme events. In their first NDCs, some countries included the economic costs they suffered because of extreme events. These figures provide only a snapshot of costs in time, and countries rarely provide historical trends. They also do not provide a breakdown of these high numbers. Across the 86 updated NDCs analyzed, countries have continued to include current economic losses and damages from extreme events as examples of losses and damages from climate change. But the total number of countries using losses from extreme events as examples has decreased slightly.

Few countries include information about future economic costs, and the number including this information in their updated NDCs has remained unchanged. Only a handful of countries discuss the use of climate change scenarios to calculate these future losses and damages. Additionally, the authors found no references in the NDCs to emerging risks beyond adaptation nor an articulation of hard or soft adaptation limits.

Most countries have shied away from defining the term L&D. It has become very relevant in international climate policy over the last decade, but only Peru, Papua New Guinea, and Vietnam have included a clear definition in their updated NDCs (UNFCCC 2021b). This suggests that L&D remains a “state of art” term in the negotiations, and countries have limited experience of operationalizing the term within their national contexts. Figure 10 provides references to how countries are including the term in their NDCs.

Despite the lack of a definition, the authors found elements of averting, minimizing, and addressing climate change L&D in the updated NDCs (see Figure 11). More updated NDCs mention slower onset events; include references to mobility, displacement, and planned relocation in response to climate impacts; and include issues related to finance and capacity building for L&D. Actions related to comprehensive risk management—such as setting up early warning systems (averting), instituting risk transfer mechanisms (minimizing), and strengthening emergency response and recovery (addressing)—provide opportunities for countries to begin the practical integration of L&D in the adaptation component of their NDCs (Addison et al. 2021).

Transformative Adaptation in the NDCs

References to transformative adaptation are limited in the NDCs. Transformative adaptation is a fundamental shift in underlying systems in response to actual or expected climate change and its effects. It is distinct from incremental actions that attempt to maintain existing system norms (Noble et al. 2014). Only five updated NDCs explicitly mentioned the term transformative adaptation. The authors found no evidence in the NDCs to suggest that adaptation actions were prioritized on the basis of long-term adaptation pathways, identification of levers for causing system shifts, or avoidance of maladaptation. In fact, countries do not have a uniform understanding of transformative adaptation as changes in underlying system properties in response to or anticipation of climate change. In addition to a lack of consensus among countries about transformative adaptation as a concept, the lack of details regarding the scale or intent of adaptation priorities in the NDCs made it difficult to adequately assess the transformative potential of priority actions.

However, the authors identified different elements of transformative adaptation in the prioritized adaptation actions. Updated NDCs had more prioritized actions that included elements of scaling actions over a larger geographic area or population group. This was reflected in either the wording or in the target of the action. More actions in the updated NDCs aimed to scale their activities while addressing underlying systemic concerns. Yet there was a drop in references to innovation as part of the prioritized actions between the first and updated NDCs. Figure 12 breaks down elements of transformative adaptation in the first and updated NDCs. Table 3 provides examples of the types of transformative adaptation actions in the NDCs.

Our assessment found that countries have developed more detailed adaptation components in their updated NDCs compared to their first NDCs. They consulted more government agencies and ministries, as well as different stakeholder groups, to develop their adaptation components. A high-level political body also approved most updated NDCs for submission to the UNFCCC. This has helped increase domestic awareness about and commitment to the goals in the updated NDCs. However, more attention to some elements of this assessment framework does not necessarily mean that these elements have been well addressed in the updated NDCs. The framework assesses major trends across the NDCs but cannot make assessments about the quality or adequacy of the different activities to respond to impacts of climate change.

The authors found that the adaptation components of updated NDCs made more references to other national plans and policies and were better aligned with them. Along with an increase in references to the NAP process, many countries’ NDCs also refer to their national development plans and climate change policies and include sectoral and subnational plans and policies in relation to advancing adaptation actions. More countries also refer to other international processes, such as the SDGs and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The analysis shows that when countries include impact, risk, and vulnerability information, they use information from national documents such as the national communications to the UNFCCC. When countries have completed their national communications, they are able to draw on the latest vulnerability and impact information to develop their adaptation NDCs. Other sources of information that countries have used include national-level assessments conducted as part of different adaptation planning, such as the NAP process. This information increasingly reflects the severity of climate impacts that countries are experiencing and the need for more efforts to advance adaptation actions.

The prioritized adaptation actions in the first and updated NDCs cover all the systems that the Global Commission on Adaptation identified as being critical for adaptation. Compared to the first NDCs, the updated NDCs have more prioritized actions related to critical systems such as water, food and nutrition security, and advancing nature-based solutions. Other critical systems, such as infrastructure, cities and urban areas, human health, adaptation finance, and locally led adaptation, also receive more attention in the updated NDCs (see Figure 4). Although most of the assessed countries have increased the number of prioritized adaptation actions in their updated NDCs, a few countries actually have fewer priorities than in their first NDCs.

Only a few prioritized adaptation actions include baselines, targets, indicators, and costs. The number of updated NDCs including indicator frameworks and targets for the actions has increased, though the numbers are still low. The information on costs, in particular, seems limited because countries are not clear on the calculation methods they use. References to integrating climate adaptation into national budgets are also limited. This suggests that countries need to do more work to develop costing methodologies and align them with other ongoing initiatives to integrate climate change risks into their national budgets in order to develop robust cost estimates. These are important elements of creating realistic and feasible NDC implementation and investment plans.

The number of countries including information on their adaptation MEL activities has increased but remains low. Some countries also detail how they will track the implementation and financing of their NDCs and communicate that information to the UNFCCC. Countries will need to coordinate and align these two activities as implementation of the adaptation component of the NDCs gathers pace.

The updated NDCs reflect improvements in the integration of gender equality as well as the integration of local knowledge and indigenous concerns. Many more countries now include equal participation and influence in decision-making by women and men, and allocation of resources and benefits addresses gender inequality as part of adaptation plans. Indigenous groups are referred to in more NDCs, but the analysis shows that many countries did not conduct consultations with indigenous and local groups during the development of the adaptation NDC. However, other national adaptation planning processes may have facilitated participation of diverse groups.

Many countries are still not clear about how to design actions to contend with losses and damages. Some countries have reported economic losses and damages from past climate disasters. A few countries have mentioned noneconomic costs, slow-onset events, and efforts to address migration and displacements as a result of climate change in their updated NDCs. Comprehensive management of climate impacts and risks (involving averting, minimizing, and addressing losses and damages) by improving early warning systems, increasing access to insurance, and better integrating climate change into disaster risk management practices seem like promising ways to incorporate the issue.

Countries have not planned for transformative adaptations that change underlying system dynamics and respond to increasing shocks and stresses from climate change. The authors were able to identify actions that addressed some elements of transformative adaptation, such as scaling adaptation actions and addressing underlying system properties, incorporating innovations, and shifting the location of actions in response to climate change. However, countries need to clarify how they can achieve transformative adaptation. Moreover, there were no strong links between inclusion of potentially transformative actions in a country’s NDC with the ways to avert, minimize, and address losses and damages from the adverse impacts of climate change.

Based on the findings from our assessment, we propose the following actions for consideration by country governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, and the UNFCCC with regard to the adaptation components of NDCs.

For Country Governments

• Though different countries will take different approaches, they should consider the adaptation component of their NDCs as part of a wider suite of harmonized instruments for advancing adaptation action at the national level. Instead of viewing the adaptation NDC as a stand-alone or parallel planning document, countries should strengthen its links with other plans and processes. Improved links with the NAP process, which is a much more comprehensive planning instrument, could help countries advance implementation. The adaptation NDCs, together with the adaptation communications, could provide more international visibility for adaptation.
• Countries can develop the adaptation component of their NDCs in line with their needs and priorities. However, they should ensure that the adaptation NDCs are strategically aligned with other adaptation instruments of the Paris Agreement (Dale et al. 2020). Attempts at such strategic alignment can help determine how best to structure the adaptation NDC and identify the type of information necessary to enable implementation at the scale and speed required. Countries can already consider how to include adaptation as part of the ETF and consider how ongoing adaptation MEL efforts can support the development of adaptation NDC implementation tracking as part of the Paris Agreement.
• Countries should consider engaging a wide variety of stakeholders during the development of the adaptation NDCs, including local and indigenous groups, women, youth, and the elderly. Inclusion of such groups could help make the priorities more inclusive and focused on reducing vulnerabilities.

For Bilateral and Multilateral Donors

• The NDC priorities could influence the development of donor country strategies. Compared to other critical systems, the number of actions under cities and urban areas, locally led adaptation, adaptation financing, and human health is low in both the first and updated NDCs. This suggests that in addition to investments in high-profile sectors such as food and nutrition security, nature-based solutions, and water, donors could consider investing at scale in integrating climate adaptation into less traditional climate adaptation sectors as well.
• Under the Paris Agreement, both the ETF and the biennial transparency report’s adaptation section (Rai et al. 2019) provide opportunities to link national adaptation MEL systems with systems to track NDC implementation progress. Developing-country governments could benefit from guidance and tools for tracking adaptation NDC implementation and linking it with ongoing national MEL efforts. Donors could consider making investments to link national adaptation MEL systems with national reporting requirements to the Paris Agreement as part of improved transparency and accountability efforts.
• Donors should support developing countries to develop investment and implementation plans for the prioritized adaptation actions in the NDCs. For example, donors could help developing countries to develop and apply country-led and nationally appropriate indicators and baselines as well as cost estimation methods for priority actions. These priorities also should be integrated into ongoing national development and adaptation planning processes such the NAP.
• As climate change impacts intensify, donors should help national governments improve their comprehensive risk management approaches for addressing climate change–related losses and damages. This could include supporting the integration of climate risks into disaster risk reduction and management activities, supporting the establishment of early warning systems for multiple hazards, and promoting risk transfer mechanism such as insurance. Donors could also support the use of different climate scenarios to calculate noneconomic and economic losses and damages.
• Identifying pathways—the sequence of flexible actions—to create transformative adaptation actions across many sectors, identifying ways to improve innovations, and linking such approaches to long-term plans and strategies will become critical as countries strengthen resilience (Carter et al. 2018). Donors can play an important role in funding country-level research to catalyze conversations and build the capacity of national institutions to drive this agenda. Countries lack an agreed definition of transformative adaptation, which is a barrier that improved support could help overcome.

For the UNFCCC

• The Paris Agreement has a growing number of instruments for reporting and communicating information about adaptation, such as adaptation communications, NDCs, NAPs, biennial transparency reports, and national communications. However, the kind of information that should be included in each of these instruments remains unclear. The Adaptation Committee is already developing supplementary guidance, mapping out the information needs of the adaptation communications. At the same time, this guidance could map out the information needs of the other instruments and provide guidance on the links between them. This work could help countries to structure their information for different adaptation instruments and remove duplication. Ultimately, countries need to decide for themselves how they see the different instruments. The secretariat could facilitate this decision by providing examples of how different countries have approached and structured different instruments.
• As countries enhance their NDCs, the regular annual synthesis reports of NDCs by the secretariat (paragraph 30 of Decision 1/CMA.3) provides an opportunity to update the information on adaptation and thereby indicate what has changed since the previous round of NDCs. If possible, the secretariat could consider displaying the information from the adaptation component of the NDCs, enabling wider outreach and learning. By promoting transparent and easy-to-update information through an accessible platform, the secretariat could provide crucial support to increase adaptation ambition.

Countries are at different stages of adaptation planning and implementation. Yet a majority of them have included an adaptation component in their NDCs, which is evidence that adaptation is an important area of focus, on par with mitigation. The work program on the Global Goal on Adaptation in Glasgow has also raised the need for all countries to consider adaptation (UNFCCC 2021c).

Most countries have used their NDCs to communicate a list of prioritized adaptation actions in line with their needs and capacities. The NAP process has influenced the articulation of these adaptation priorities in many countries. Even when there is no final NAP document, the NAP process includes many activities that can help advance adaptation action.

Because countries have flexibility in deciding how to include adaptation in their NDCs, the adaptation information they include is of different types and different scales. Each country presents adaptation information based on its own needs and concerns through its NDC. The Paris Agreement provides little guidance to countries on how to structure the adaptation component, in contrast to mitigation. This creates difficulties in conducting cross-country comparisons of the adaptation components of the NDCs.

Although countries have made significant progress in adaptation planning and implementation, there are areas that need additional work. More work is required to ensure that adaptation priorities are investment and implementation ready. This is critical for raising finance and addressing implementation capacity gaps. Countries will also need to decide how they will track the implementation of the adaptation components of the NDCs. This will require developing-country governments to develop timelines, baselines, indicators, and costs for the prioritized adaptation actions as well as to align national-level monitoring and evaluation activities with NDC implementation tracking. Donors can target resources to help developing-country governments undertake or strengthen these processes.

Countries may not wish to overload the NDCs with all the elements of adaptation that are needed for a comprehensive response, such as that taken in NAPs and national plans and budgets. The NDCs should reflect and provide strategic priorities on adaptation, and the NAP and other instruments may be used to implement the adaptation NDCs.

Assessment Methodology

The research was based on the textual analysis of NDC documents submitted by governments to the UNFCCC, made available in the NDC registry on a rolling basis (UNFCCC 2021b). A total of 86 first NDCs and 86 updated NDCs, and nine NAP documents, submitted to the UNFCCC NAP Central, were also analyzed (UNFCCC n.d.).

An assessment tool was developed in Microsoft Excel, and a team of five coders completed the coding of the NDCs. A few initial NDCs were double coded in a pilot run of the tool to ensure standardization and consistency. Based on the results of this pilot assessment, the tool kit was revised in content and structure. Once the revised tool kit was finalized, coders single coded each document. One of the coders spoke Spanish and translated the documents that were in Spanish and did not have formal English translations. All coded documents were reviewed once by an external consultant and then finalized. All the data from this assessment are available in WRI’s Climate Watch platform at www.climatewatchdata.org.

The assessment framework included four distinct modules to answer questions related to specific indicators. These components were merged during the tool redesign to ease coding. The final framework tool had two sheets: one to answer adaptation-related questions from the NDCs and a second sheet to code the adaptation priorities in the NDCs.

The framework starts out with a few general questions related to identifying the coder, the type of document coded, the presence of an adaptation component, and links to adaptation communications. The rest of the framework consists of the following components.

Component 1: Elements of Adaptation Communications

The UNFCCC has provided no guidance to Parties on how to structure the adaptation component of the NDCs. The closest such guidance is one produced during COP24 (2018) for the development of adaptation communications. This guidance was used as the first step for the analysis of the NDCs. WRI’s Enhancing NDCs: A Guide to Strengthening National Climate Plans by 2020 report included a table of additional questions to ask related to this guidance (Fransen et al. 2019). This table was further modified to develop questions for this assessment.

The full list of questions and subquestions that were derived from the guidance and from WRI’s Enhancing NDCs report is presented below in Table A1. The last column also includes instructions to coders on what to look for in each question.

Component 2: Critical Systems and Sectors in Adaptation Priorities

Building off the questions above, the priorities communicated in the updated NDCs were reviewed against the action tracks from the Global Commission on Adaptation to assess their comprehensiveness and alignment. An early decision was taken to develop the methodology to check alignment with the core Adapt Now report’s critical systems, not the overarching revolutions in understanding, planning, and financing, as articulated in the Adapt Now report. This assumed that most of the adaptation priorities in the NDCs would be action oriented and along sectoral lines. Human health and locally led adaptation were two additional elements added to final Adapt Now critical system categories. Each critical system has several subcomponents that are critical to reaching success around increasing resilience and adaptive capacities. Each adaptation priority could be coded a total of three times in the assessment tool. This was because there was wide variation in how the priorities were articulated. Whereas some were specific, others were broad and included multiple sectors in the same priority. An “other” category was added to each subcomponent and the systems to capture anything that could not be coded under these categories (Table A2).

An analysis compared the existing methodology and adaptation assessment in Climate Watch to the new approach. This assessment revealed that although the new methodology included more information, it could be beneficial to code the adaptation priorities along the older Climate Watch economic sectors. Thus, along with coding the adaptation priorities in the NDCs along the critical systems, they were also coded along the sectoral categories used by Climate Watch using World Bank’s economic sector categorization. The full list of sectors that were used can be found in Table A3. Each adaptation priority could be coded for a total of three times for these sectors as well.

There was wide variation in how countries were articulating their priorities in the NDC documents. Whereas some actions were specific and action oriented, others were broad and included actions in different sectors in the same priority. Categorizing each action many times helped to capture how they mapped across the critical sectors despite such variation.

Component 3: Losses and Damages

For a number of countries, the adaptation component of their NDCs is also starting to reflect their concerns about losses and damages related to climate change. To better understand how countries were communicating this, the assessment framework attempts to understand both explicit and implicit references to losses and damages. The full list of questions for losses and damages are presented in Table A4 below. Some of these questions ask if a country has explicitly included Loss and Damage in its NDC and has provided a definition of it; if it presents figures for current and future losses and damages and is transparent about the use of climate scenarios in the presentation of these numbers; if it includes references to displacement and migration, noneconomic losses, comprehensive risk management, and insurance; and if it addresses barriers to addressing losses and damages, including capacity gaps, data gaps, institutional setup, policies and laws, and finance.

Component 4: Transformative Adaptation

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines transformative adaptation as actions “seek[ing] to change the fundamental attributes of systems in response to actual or expected climate and its effects, often at a scale and ambition greater than incremental activities. It includes changes in activities, such as changing livelihoods from cropping to livestock or by migrating to take up a livelihood elsewhere, and also changes in our perceptions and paradigms about the nature of climate change, adaptation, and their relationship to other natural and human systems” (Noble et al. 2014).

WRI’s own work seeks to identify transformative pathways and transformative processes to create the types of change described by the IPCC. A set of simple questions derived from Section 4 of WRI’s paper on transformative adaptation was developed (Carter et al. 2021). Staff from WRI’s Climate Resilience Practice conducted this analysis and provided input for the design of these questions. Past papers on transformative adaptation had already identified a number of adaptation priorities in past NDCs as transformative. These were used to further identify adaptation priorities that could be transformative in both the first and updated NDCs. Table A5 presents the full list of questions that were asked for transformative adaptation.

This table presents coded NDC and NAP submissions up until June 30, 2021. First NDCs, updated NDCs, and NAPs were analyzed and coded based on the approved methodology, which captured information related to elements of adaptation communications, losses and damages, and transformative adaptation.

Available at https://datasets.wri.org/dataset/ndc-adaptation-ambition.

This table presents a sectoral breakdown of countries’ adaptation priorities, based on the Global Commission on Adaptation’s critical systems. Individual priorities were coded with up to three different Adapt Now sectors, so the sum of sectoral frequencies may exceed the total adaptation actions for any given document.

Available at https://datasets.wri.org/dataset/ndc-adaptation-ambition.

COP Conference of the Parties

CW Climate Watch

ETF Enhanced Transparency Framework

FPIC free, prior, and informed consent

GHG greenhouse gas

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

L&D Loss and Damage

MEL monitoring, evaluation, and learning

NAP national adaptation plan

NDC nationally determined contribution

PSP power system planning

SDG Sustainable Development Goal

UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

WRI World Resources Institute

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1. 1To conduct the analysis before the end of the donor agreement, the authors determined this cutoff date in order to complete their research within the period of the grant, as outlined within the scope of work. There was a short extension to the cutoff date for three countries— Canada, Ethiopia, and Zambia—that submitted replacements for their updated NDCs in July 2021, shortly after the June 30 cutoff. The authors decided to include these replacements in the analysis over the old updated NDCs, but they stopped doing so after the end of July. However, the authors continued to analyze additional NDCs submitted past the cutoff date, which are available for review on the Climate Watch platform, www.climatewatchdata.org/ndcs-explore?category=adaptation..
2. 2Based on work by Mechler et al. (2018), we also draw a distinction here to distinguish between the capitalized term Loss and Damage to refer to political debates under the UNFCCC versus lowercase losses and damages to refer to observed impacts and projected risks from climate change.
3. 3The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines transformative adaptation as actions “seek[ing] to change the fundamental attributes of systems in response to actual or expected climate and its effects, often at a scale and ambition greater than incremental activities. It includes changes in activities, such as changing livelihoods from cropping to livestock or by migrating to take up a livelihood elsewhere, and also changes in our perceptions and paradigms about the nature of climate change, adaptation, and their relationship to other natural and human systems” (Noble et al. 2014). The authors used the IPCC framework in tandem with previous WRI work on transformative adaptation in the food and nutrition security critical system to create a working definition of transformative adaptation actions based on the IPCC definition. The authors consider actions to be transformative if they seek to create systemic change through an expansion in scale, address changes in the overall system, include innovation, or include a shift in location in response to climate change (Carter et al. 2018). More details on the development of the transformative adaptation component can be found in Appendix A.
4. 4Based on work by Mechler et al. (2018), we also draw a distinction here to distinguish between the capitalized term Loss and Damage to refer to political debates under the UNFCCC versus lowercase losses and damages to refer to observed impacts and projected risks from climate change.

WRI acknowledges its institutional strategic partners, which provide core funding to WRI: the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation.

Funding from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ) as a contribution to the NDC Partnership made this work possible, and we appreciate the ministry’s support. We would also like to thank the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the International Institute for Environment and Development, the NAP Global Network, and Vivid Economics for providing input in this work.

We would like to acknowledge Mengpin Ge and the Climate Program at WRI for facilitating the integration of this working paper’s data set onto the Climate Watch data platform.

We would like to thank Natalia Alayza, Talia Chorover, Richard Christel, Matti Goldberg, Charles Iceland, Kalyan Keo, Rohini Kohli, Christian Ledwell, Amanda McKee, Sejal Patel, Jennifer Doherty Bigara Rodriguez, Katie Ross, and David Waskow for their valuable reviews and insights on this paper.

Thank you to Emily Mathews, Carlos Muñoz Piña, Logan Byers, Romain Warnault, Lauri Scherer, Shannon Collins, Rosie Ettenheim, and Shannon Paton for their support in this paper’s production.

Finally, we would like to thank Ayesha Dinshaw and Rebecca Carter for making this working paper possible.

Aarjan Dixit is a Consultant in the field of climate change, resilience, and international development.

Contact: aarjand@gmail.com

Marcella Kim is a former Research Analyst with the Climate Resilience Practice at WRI. Kim is currently an International Climate Policy and Engagement Coordinator with the U.S. Department of State.

Contact: kim.marcella.j@gmail.com

Ryan O’Connor is a Research Assistant with the Climate Resilience Practice at WRI.

Contact: ryan.oconnor@wri.org

Melaina Dyck is a former Intern on Nature-Based Solutions with the Global Commission on Adaptation at WRI. Dyck is currently an Analyst with Climate Focus.

Contact: m.dyck@climatefocus.com

Gianna Ferrarin is a former Intern on Cities with the Global Commission on Adaptation at WRI. Ferrarin is currently a journalist tracking court filings as a News Assistant at Law360.

Contact: giannamferrarin@gmail.com

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