This paper explores the question as to 'what do organisations that are adapting to climate change look like?' Examples are drawn from a survey of statutory regulations, guiding principles and organisational documents shaping current practice, with particular emphasis on the water and conservation sectors of industrialised nations. In so far as it is possible to distil recurring themes into common traits, nine hallmarks are identified. These include visionary leadership, objective setting, risk and vulnerability assessment, guidance for practitioners, organisational learning, low-regret adaptive management, multipartner working, monitoring and reporting progress and effective communication. Recognising that adaptation is highly context and scale dependent, an organisation might not necessarily exhibit all these features. However, our inventory provides a practical basis for reviewing the priorities and progress on adaptation capacity building within public and private sector organisations alike.

SA Sports Medicine Vol.15(1) 2003: 9-15

International climate finance plays a key role in enabling the implementation of adaptation measures. However, while there is a common metric for gauging the effectiveness of finance for mitigation – greenhouse gas emission reduction per unit of funding – no corresponding metric exists for adaptation. Instead, assessments of what works best in adaptation finance focus either on procedural aspects of funding modalities, such as equity in the allocation of funding, or on the extent to which specific adaptation activities produce the desired results. This mixed methods systematic review aims to assess the effectiveness of adaptation finance and bridge the gap between those two approaches. It involves a transparent and comprehensive synthesis of the academic and grey literature on how different characteristics of adaptation projects in sub-Saharan Africa – and finance for those projects – affect adaptation outcomes, particularly in terms of risk and vulnerability to climate change impacts. Finalised adaptation projects funded by a set of the multilateral climate funds and two bilateral donors (United Kingdom and Sweden) are the focus of this review. The findings can help inform the future design and implementation of adaptation activities as well as funding decisions.

SA Sports Medicine Vol.15(1) 2003: 9-15

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