10 November 2025~
Expert comment
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Written byMairi Dupar
Image credit:Lothina1/Shutterstock
There are high expectations that COP30 will adopt a package to measure progress on climate adaptation. But several elements must fall in place for a decision that is robust.
As government officials, civil society and business representatives arrive in Belém, Brazil for COP30, extreme weather such as Hurricane Melissa and its widespread destruction weigh heavily on delegates’ minds. With climate change an immediate danger to vast numbers of people and precious ecosystems, decision-makers are asking how to adapt better, faster and smarter to reduce climate risks.
On the table at this year’s COP is a proposed package of indicators to measure adaptation progress at a global scale. It’s an effort to track how, collectively, we are achieving the Paris Agreement’s global goal on adaptation (GGA), to “strengthen resilience, reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity.”
The indicator package and its implementation could provide us with a clear sense of whether adaptation activities and outcomes are being achieved.
It could also highlight the nature of the ‘adaptation gap’ between needs and actions, and tell us whether sustained support from the historic emitters to the most climate-affected countries is helping to bridge that gap.
There’s all to play for, but to achieve a strong COP30 decision on the GGA, negotiators will need to navigate carefully around multiple pitfalls.
The adaptation journey from Dubai to Belém
Two years ago at COP28 in Dubai, governments adopted the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which sets out seven thematic targets for adaptation, related to: water security; food security and agriculture; human health; ecosystems and biodiversity; infrastructure; poverty and livelihoods; and cultural heritage. The framework also has four targets for dimensions of the adaptation cycle: climate risk assessment; planning; implementation; and monitoring, evaluation and learning.
When governments adopted the framework, they also launched the UAE–Belém work programme to come up with indicators for measuring progress. The work programme saw a group of subject experts propose a package of 100 indicators for governments to adopt in Belém. The package could be adopted in part or in full, or governments could welcome it and lay out a pathway for technical work and future adoption. Reporting on indicators will be voluntary, under any scenario. Irrespective of its voluntary status, the content of the package will send strong signals about ‘what counts’.
But several elements must fall in place for a GGA decision that is robust.
What will make for a strong GGA decision?
Governments will come to a strong decision on the GGA if they:
Adopt indicators to measure means of implementation that are relevant to developing countries.
Several of the indicators measure the means of implementation: referring to the finance, capacity building and technological transfer that underpin adaptation action. It’s widely acknowledged that these indicators will need to be negotiated separately from the rest of the package, either because the experts have presented several options to choose from, or because some of them are inappropriate for developing countries.
The focus should be on measuring the magnitude, usefulness and quality of support (or ‘MOI’) provided internationally to help developing countries assess and meet their adaptation needs. Here, the quality of support refers to how much finance is concessional or grant-based, and avoids hobbling countries with unsustainable debt.
Keep indicators in the package to measure adaptation along the spectrum of inputs, outputs and outcomes: all of which, together, will give a fuller picture of adaptation progress than we have at present.
The experts have done a sterling job of following governments’ guidance in Baku to produce indicators incorporating all these elements. Compiling these different indicator results and understanding them as an integral narrative, beyond lone statistics, will be essential to delivering a truly meaningful indicator package.
Some governments want to remove indicators that measure climate impacts on people and ecosystems, and the effectiveness of adaptation in reducing those impacts. But that would be short-sighted. No single metric tells the whole story, yet together they show whether adaptation is actually working. When I first examined Odisha’s pioneering climate and disaster risk plan 15 years ago, the benefits weren’t immediately obvious. But by 2023, the state could point to thousands of lives saved from cyclones as a direct result of its actions. Good adaptation can be measured; over time, real outcomes do become visible.
Retain indicators in the package on multi-scale adaptation action, from local to national to transboundary.
The draft package does a commendable job of capturing the truly multi-scale nature of climate risk and how actors must understand and address risk across scales. It’s imperative that this stays in the indicator package – despite objections by some governments in an October 2025 workshop to inclusion of the local and transboundary aspects – perhaps because of their geopolitical and/or domestic political preoccupations.
Retain proposals for countries to provide disaggregated information by social, ecosystem and other relevant categories.
As well as the 100 main indicators, the experts made proposals to add extra, disaggregated information where available. This is also voluntary, but sends an important signal about how we understand climate risk and measure resilience. While there would be topline reporting on adaptation inputs, outputs or outcomes, the results could also be disaggregated by social group (such as women, young and Indigenous peoples, people living with disability), ecosystem type (mountain, coastal, marine, wetland, aridland, etc) and geographic scale, as relevant. While thoroughly disaggregated reporting will not be achieved overnight, over time, it will provide a richer picture of which ecological systems and social groups are bearing most climate risk and strengthening their resilience, and where gaps lie to be addressed.
Stay joined-up with progress in gender negotiations and with the emergent Gender Action Plan.
A pushback against gender-disaggregated reporting by some governments - which has been well documented by ODI Global - to date is reflective of broader attempts to backslide on gender justice by regressive voices in the UNFCCC.
Given the reality of gender and social injustices, gender- and age- disaggregation are the barest of bare minimums, and should be supported under the GGA. Further, the package contains a solid indicator to measure the number of Parties producing gender-responsive National Adaptation Plans or strategies: this must stay.
A true measure of success in Belem would be if countries not only prevented backsliding on gender and social inclusion, but also mandated further indicator development to fill gender- and social-related gaps in the indicator package. This would include mandating the development of indicators on how finance is flowing to women-, youth- and Indigenous-led adaptation action (which only gets a passing and unspecific mention under ‘cross cutting activities’ in the package at present).
Mandate further work on indicators and clarify roles for reporting.
At COP30, governments must mandate further technical work on indicators and a vision for how this connects back to the political process. Only 22 of the proposed indicators have fully developed methodologies and pipelines in place for reporting of data, meaning that they could be reported to the UNFCCC (in theory) almost immediately. The remainder will need further work: from ‘small tweaks’ to the creation of brand new indicators from scratch.
Critically, whichever technical body is mandated must have sufficient resources to do their further work properly and they must fully reflect the experiences and realities of SIDS and LDCs. And, further downstream, developing countries – especially SIDS and LDCs – will need ample finance, capacity building and technology transfer to fulfil their reporting roles.
The new technical work should not only be for methodology and data standards. It must also spell out who does what along the chain of data compilation, analysis, and reporting. These roles are not yet clear from the unfinished 78 indicators that have been proposed, and developing countries have justifiable anxieties about reporting burdens. Not all indicators will require central government handling. Some can be farmed out to research institutes or regional bodies who have access to the relevant quality-assured information.
Only a technical process can explore and propose those roles: negotiators have neither the time nor competency to do so. Nonetheless, in Belem, governments can direct a technical body to provide updated, detailed recommendations at a future date.
"The Belém decision can point to a phased way of implementing the indicator package over time with checkpoints built in, and adequate resourcing attached for its implementation."
Indeed, at COP29, governments agreed to establish a Baku Adaptation Road Map -- although the idea has never garnered much traction as it’s been lacking a clear purpose. Now, there is a clear need for a technical body to share back a) the refinement of indicator methodologies, b) roles for reporting indicators and c) the global results of the indicator reporting: together these could provide a raison d’etre for the Baku Adaptation Road Map, after all.
A decisive COP30 will include renewed ambition on mitigation
All told, there is much to gain in the adaptation negotiations at COP30. But the welcome focus on adaptation must in no way detract from the pressing urgency of mitigation. The more the world warms, the higher climate risks become and the less scope there is for effective adaptation. So, if any outcome is truly needed from COP30, it’s a political resolve to move into high gear on mitigation and enable adaptation and mitigation together to deliver sustainable development and a livable planet.
