Earth Day 2026 arrives at a critical moment. Climate impacts are intensifying, making adaptation an urgent necessity. But tracking a crisis is not the same as surviving it. Local survival requires localized evidence. Yet the international climate frameworks demand uniform metrics to compare nations. When global compliance supersedes local utility, who does measurement actually serve?
Against this backdrop, the adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators at COP30 marks a significant milestone. For the first time, countries have agreed on a structured way to track progress toward the Global Goal on Adaptation under the Paris Agreement. The 59 indicators span key sectors—water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, livelihoods, and culture—and align with the broader resilience framework agreed at COP28 in 2023.
But as the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) highlights in its recent working paper Evidence for Climate Action, the real question is not whether we have indicators. It is whether these indicators will actually help countries adapt better.
On this Earth Day, the challenge before us is clear: how do we ensure that global frameworks like the Belém indicators strengthen country systems, empower local decision-making, and ultimately protect the most climate-vulnerable?
From Global Metrics to Local Meaning
The Belém indicators are deliberately designed to be voluntary, country-driven, and non-prescriptive. They are not meant to rank countries or determine access to finance. This reflects long-standing concerns from developing countries about externally imposed scorecards that distort national priorities.
Yet these same indicators are now linked to the reporting architecture of the Paris Agreement, feeding into national communications, adaptation plans, and global stocktakes. This creates a delicate balance.
On one hand, the indicators can provide a shared language for tracking adaptation progress. On the other, they risk becoming another reporting burden on already stretched systems.
GEI’s research on climate monitoring and evaluation (M&E) shows that this tension is not new. Countries are already navigating overlapping frameworks from the Sustainable Development Goals to disaster risk reduction and biodiversity targets, each with its own metrics and timelines. The result is often “indicator fatigue”: parallel systems that satisfy international reporting requirements but rarely inform domestic policy.
Measuring progress is not an end in itself. It is a means to protect people, ecosystems, and livelihoods. If M&E systems do not serve those goals, they risk becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.
M&E as a Tool for Learning, Not Just Reporting
A central insight from GEI’s work is that climate M&E should be treated as a governance tool, not a bookkeeping exercise.
The distinction matters because the pull toward bookkeeping is real. On average, low-income countries can report only about 40 percent of the 231 global SDG indicators. PARIS21 has documented that two-thirds of low-income countries lack predictable funding for even the most basic Tier I statistical series. In practice, this often means a handful of officers in a ministry or national statistics office are responsible for feeding data into the UNFCCC's Enhanced Transparency Framework, the Sendai Framework, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and multiple donor and climate fund requirements at once. The same analyst expected to interpret climate vulnerability trends may also be compiling the SDG return and the biennial transparency report in the same quarter. Practitioners increasingly describe this as indicator fatigue. These findings are explored in detail in Evidence for Climate Action.
When used effectively, M&E systems can identify which adaptation measures are working and which are not, detect unintended consequences—including maladaptation—support better allocation of scarce public resources, and strengthen accountability to citizens, especially the most vulnerable. But when M&E is reduced to compliance reporting, it can drain already limited capacity and undermine trust.
The Belém indicators sit at this crossroads. They can either reinforce a compliance-driven approach or catalyze a shift toward learning and adaptive management.
Consider the complexity of what is being measured. Indicators on water stress, agricultural productivity, or climate-related health outcomes are influenced by many factors beyond adaptation policies, economic trends, demographic shifts, governance quality, and more. Without strong theories of change and context-sensitive evaluation methods, there is a real risk of misattributing progress or failure.
Even more challenging is the need to measure “non-events,” such as avoided losses or prevented disasters. These are central to adaptation but inherently difficult to quantify.
This is why GEI emphasizes mixed-method approaches, combining quantitative data with qualitative insights, local knowledge, and participatory evaluation.
Why Country Climate Platforms Matter
For the Belém indicators to be meaningful, they must be embedded where decisions are actually made. This is where country climate platforms play a pivotal role.
Country platforms—whether national climate councils, inter-ministerial coordination bodies, or integrated planning frameworks—are increasingly the hubs where adaptation priorities, financing, and implementation come together. Embedding climate and adaptation M&E within these platforms is essential for several reasons:
First, it aligns measurement with decision-making. Indicators should reflect the real choices governments face: which investments to prioritize, how to design social protection systems, or how to manage relocation risks. When M&E is integrated into national platforms, it directly informs these decisions.
Second, it reduces fragmentation. Country platforms can help harmonize the multiple reporting requirements from global frameworks, donors, and climate funds. This reduces duplication and ensures that data collected once can serve multiple purposes.
Third, it strengthens ownership and sustainability. M&E systems are more likely to endure when they are rooted in national institutions and linked to planning and budgeting processes, not driven solely by external reporting demands.
Fourth, it elevates local voices. Effective adaptation depends on local knowledge. Country platforms can create channels for community-based monitoring, citizen-generated data, and Indigenous knowledge to feed into national systems.
The message is simple but powerful: adaptation must be locally led, and measurement systems must reflect that reality.
Strengthening Country M&E Systems for Means of Implementation
An important area for continued attention within the Belém framework is how country M&E systems capture “means of implementation” including finance, technology, and capacity building.
While these elements are reflected through existing reporting under the Paris Agreement, country experience suggests that M&E systems are most effective when they can link adaptation results with the resources that enable them. Strengthening this connection at the national level can improve how progress is understood and used.
This points to the value of investing in country-led M&E systems that track not only adaptation outcomes but also the flow and use of resources; support planning and budgeting decisions within national and sectoral processes; and provide evidence to inform prioritization, especially in resource-constrained settings. Focusing on these system-level capacities can help ensure that adaptation indicators are grounded in implementation realities and remain relevant to country decision-making.
Avoiding the “Aggregation Trap”
As the Belém indicators feed into global stocktakes, another challenge emerges: aggregation.
How do we combine diverse national experiences into a coherent global picture without losing context? Many indicators rely on qualitative assessments or context-specific metrics that do not easily lend themselves to comparison.
If aggregation is driven solely by technical processes, it risks flattening local realities into simplified global narratives. But if it is grounded in dialogue—starting from country-level insights—it can support mutual learning across contexts.
This again illustrates the importance of strong national M&E systems. Global insights are only as good as the local data and analysis that underpin them.
What Success Actually Looks Like
The adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators is an important step forward. But indicators alone do not create resilience. Their value depends on how they are used. For GEI and its partners, the priorities are clear: support countries in building integrated, country-led M&E systems; ensure that indicators are fit for purpose, not just fit for reporting; embed M&E within country climate platforms to inform real decisions; promote learning-oriented approaches that can adapt over time; and strengthen the link between measurement, finance, and equity.
Ultimately, the success of the Belém indicators will not be judged in global reports or dashboards. It will be measured in whether communities are better protected from floods and droughts, whether livelihoods are more secure, and whether ecosystems are more resilient.
If the primary beneficiaries of these systems are international processes, we will have missed the point. But if they empower countries and communities to navigate an uncertain climate future, then they will have achieved something far more meaningful.
That is the promise and the responsibility of climate M&E. And that is the work we must continue, long after Earth Day has passed.
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