Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Hi all, I am Tulika Narayan, a development economist, currently focused on applying economic analysis to address climate change. I have worked at policy research firms such as Abt Global and Mathematica, and will join Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet in the Spring of 2026. I am a member of the Environmental Program Evaluation TIG.
As evaluators of climate change interventions, our role encompasses assessing the impact and cost-efficiency of these interventions to ensure that limited climate finance is utilized optimally. Beyond intended outcomes, we always consider unintended consequences—both positive and negative—to fully understand an intervention’s overall impact. In this blog, I suggest that in evaluations of climate change interventions, we should expand the definition of intended outcomes to include both mitigation and adaptation objectives, even if the intervention is focused on one or the other.
The primary goal of climate change mitigation interventions is to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Efforts such as Project Drawdown have developed taxonomies categorizing these interventions by sectors like buildings, transportation, electricity, and their respective sub-sectors. These GHG reduction interventions can also result in unintended positive impacts, known as co-benefits. For instance, large public transportation projects not only decrease GHG emissions but also reduce air pollution, leading to significant health benefits. Evaluations typically measure these co-benefits or unintended outcomes.
However, some mitigation interventions result in direct positive impacts on climate change objectives, and achieve adaptation goals. For example, smaller decentralized renewable energy projects that power remote health clinics not only reduce GHG emissions but also improve health systems’ resilience to heat. Similarly, enhancing access to clean and efficient cooling systems can both lower emissions and bolster heat resilience. These impacts should be considered direct intended outcomes of these interventions because they provide dual benefits to climate change by achieving both mitigation and adaptation goals.
Consider adaptation interventions that go beyond resilience. Adaptation interventions aim to enhance the resilience of systems and communities to climate change impacts. Evaluating these interventions presents challenges, such as the difficulty of assessment in the absence of climate events, the need to consider long-term adaptation, and the necessity for high-frequency data collection on key outcomes to allow measurement of variability of outcomes, and not just their means. Positive impacts on mitigation goals can also arise; for example, mangrove restoration projects not only bolster biodiversity but also sequester carbon, contributing to mitigation efforts. Conversely, some adaptation strategies, like constructing seawalls, may negatively impact GHG emissions. These “unintended” mitigation impacts are in fact direct climate change impacts of adaptation interventions.
Revisit climate intervention taxonomies and consider mitigation and adaptation outcomes. To systematize this idea, I propose that the current taxonomies for climate change interventions include an added dimension that indicates whether the intervention achieves mitigation, adaptation, or dual objectives. This will ensure that financing efforts focused solely on mitigation do not overlook win-win interventions that also achieve adaptation objectives and vice versa. If the dual benefits are not recognized, even if evaluations measure them as unintended impacts, the project strategy and monitoring efforts may not, potentially leading to overinvestment in interventions with negative implications or underinvestment in those with unacknowledged co-benefits.
Accordingly, climate change project taxonomies should incorporate categorizations reflecting mitigation, adaptation, or combined mitigation-adaptation outcomes to ensure accurate assessment and resource allocation. Equally, programs and their strategy, monitoring, learning and evaluations frameworks should consider both mitigation and adaptation outcomes as direct intended outcomes, even if the climate financing is focused on one or the other.
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