Committees
IPAM Committees: Different paths to a common goal
The 2017 Adaptation Gap Report suggests that a system for assessing global adaptation progress should be:
a) Broad to absorb the wide range of existing information sources and formats;
b) Rigorous to capture essential metrics of change;
c) Flexible to accommodate innovations in assessment approaches.
Such a system would help collecting and directing funds and resources with the most efficient ways and greater results in term of adaptation.
Assessing global adaptation progress requires metrics that are applicable across countries and sectors, and over time. There is unfortunately no simple, unique and universal adaptation metrics than can be used over economic sectors (agriculture, water, energy, etc.), given the complexity of adaptation processes and the particularity of adaptation at various temporal, spatial, economic, social and cultural scales, but also the diversity of resources, vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity.
Considering this common aim of establishing efficient monitoring & evaluation systems while addressing the special needs of each sector, IPAM structures its work in dedicated thematical committees:
IPAM Committee on
Techniques and Tools
The Techniques and Tools Committee (T&T) aims to convene an interdisciplinary group of experts, merging and adding new approaches to each discipline’s “tool kit”, for surveilling, archiving and sharing, evaluating, co-developing, and piloting techniques and tools:
- Digital technologies such as blockchain and internet of things (IoT), the increasing availability of digital data sets and platforms, advances in climate observation, and modelling of climate and its impacts promise to revolutionize the potential for coming up with new, integrated, more granular, and algorithmically driven metrics to enable more insightful decision making.
- Advances in decision sciences can further integrate with these next generation metrics. Social science advances, including in surveying, engaging, and understanding individuals, communities, all the way to supra-national institutions promise to create fundamental advances in how metrics are used, and inform what metrics have value, for whom.
- Developments in tools and metrics deployed by business, public administration, finance and insurance all can be harnessed for better adaptation metrics, and thus for better adaptation, across all areas of society, the economy, and for the environment.
T&T would like to play a key role at organizing the world’s collective expertise to encourage and co-develop these advances.
If interested contact:
Karl Schultz
Chairman of the IPAM Steering Committee and IPAM Techniques and Tools Committee
Creator of the climate “Vulnerability Reduction Credit” (VRC™) instrument, his work focuses on adaptation economics, incentives and behavioural economics for adaptation, decision science, next generation technologies, measurement approaches and standards as they apply to adaptation and adaptation finance.
IPAM Committee
on Agriculture
In the agriculture sector, and due to its complex and multi-dimensional nature, a wide range of adaptation metrics can be used for social, economic and production monitoring and evaluation of agriculture projects. For instance, the Climate Smart Agriculture Programming and Indicator Tool developed by CGIAR, contains more than 378 metrics taken from DfID, World Bank, CCAFS, USAID, IFAD, GIZ and FAO. Such metrics may be used to track and improve the performance of on-going projects and the design of future projects, from local to global scales.
Adaptation metrics may help quantifying how vulnerable and poor farmers increase their incomes, livelihood, and their adaptation to climate change, through agri-food and natural resources management systems, that at the same time increase adaptation – mitigation cross benefits.
The objective of the Agriculture Committee of the IPAM is to develop metrics to track performance of adaptation projects in their human, environmental, and financial dimensions, to estimate the finance gap (by governments, donors, banks, development agencies and private sector) and better allocate resources, and to record how projects are converted into outcomes and impacts to better adapt to climate change, in the framework of countries’ agriculture strategies, NDCs and NAPs.
If interested contact:
Riad Balaghi
IPAM's Secretariat representative, Chair of the Agriculture Committee, Director of Projects at the AAA Initiative Foundation.
Dr Riad Balaghi worked as scientist and as international consultant in various climate risk management, agricultural development and climate change projects in Africa, Asia and Europe. He published many scientific and technical related papers and is deeply involved with adaptation metrics for agriculture. He was a member of CoP22 scientific committee and received the FAO Medal of Merit in 2009 for his extensive work on climate change.
Andreea Nowak
Andreea Nowak is Research Team Lead for Climate Action at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, a CGIAR institute. Her research focuses on metrics in the agriculture sector, in the context of national and global reporting processes such as the UNFCCC. For more than a decade, she collaborated with governments, non-government and private sector actors across Latin America and Africa to co-design and implement tools for prioritizing, scaling, monitoring, and evaluation of strategies, policies, and investments, in climate-resilient agriculture. She has published extensively on these topics.
IPAM Committee
on Water
The Water Committee aims to constitute an interdisciplinary group of water experts from the resource itself (water as a good and risk - quality, quantity), its form (surface or groundwater), its usages (agriculture, domestic and industrial, nature), approaches and methodologies used to quantify, protect (risk related analysis), plan and manage, and revise hydrology, hydrogeology and hydraulics concept’s calculations and assumptions to include climate change effects for adaptation (methodologies, metrics and techniques) to:
- Sensitize and highlight the value of water in terms of quality, quantity, and usages, and the importance of wise and rational use
- Promote water related data observatories in Africa due to data availability related to the system weakness – Data matters for further steps
- Estimate the impact of climate changes on all types of water resources,
- Develop new methods and realistic assumptions for hydraulic infrastructures calculation,
- Co-develop, co-construct, share, evaluate - advanced vision, methods and techniques, integrated planning (Nexus vision), decision making, water metrics, etc. combining highly advanced systems analysis numerical technologies (artificial intelligence concepts, data science, modeling and simulation, and optimization)
If interested contact:
Driss Ouazar
ASRIC vice-chair; Chair of IPAM Water Committee;
Professor Ouazar is Professor of Computational Water Resources Engineering and Environment, IAHS Representative; Moroccan High Water and Climate Council member; Resident Member of Hassan II Academy of Science and now Director of Environmental, land and water sciences and techniques and Board Member; Former Member of the Higher Council of Education, Training and Scientific Research; Former Director of ENSMR School of Engineering and Provost of UM6P University, Co-Chair and Host of two Post COP22 Adaptation Metrics conferences, Initiator and Founder of Adaptation Metrics and Techniques Cluster Water, Agriculture and Cities.
IPAM Committee
on Cities
IPAM Cities is a platform for experts, practitioners and decision-makers to create a collaborative space to find solutions for the following challenges:
- The challenges regarding the measurement of adaptation outcomes and the unavailability of (dialogue) spaces for the definition of comparable and shared metrics, that reduce legitimacy and confidence in the process of M&E.
- The lack of practical approaches that combine adaptation needs with existing metrics and indicators, evaluation tools and local knowledge and experience to reduce effort investment, incorporate local experience and capacities and mainstream adaptation in urban context.
- The difficulty in integrating adaptation management into current existing institutions for urban planning, that do not consider processes of learning and that are crucial for adaptation.
The final aim is to advance the co-creation of knowledge on usable adaptation metrics in city planning and management practice that can help local authorities, promoters and communities as well as funding agencies and upper levels of governments that are investing in urban adaptation, to (i) develop learning processes that can deliver practical solutions (ii) measure benefits and avoided costs, and thus, justify budgets, and eventually, (iii) increase the legitimacy of their adaptation actions and investment.
If interested contact:
Marta Olazabal
Research Fellow, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Chair of the IPAM Cities Committee,
Marta Olazabal is Head of the Adaptation Research Group at BC3. She is an environmental engineer and social scientist, recipient of a two-year AXA Research Fund Fellowship. She has widely published and participated in projects related to adaptation monitoring and evaluation, particularly at city level. Based on this experience, she is currently contributing to IPCC and AGR processes.