King's College London

The Climate Change Committee has urged the Scottish Government to introduce quantifiable climate adaptation targets to: (a) monitor progress towards the goal of "mak[ing] communities, public services, the natural environment, and the economy more resilient"; and (b) inform the design of the next Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP4).

But key questions persist with setting and monitoring climate adaptation targets:

• What constitutes successful, effective, and/or good adaptation? To what extent is that understanding shared across different sectors, teams, and risks?
• How can well-coordinated targets between sectors and across geographical scales be designed? What criterion should be used to prioritise targets?
• Which indicators (output, outcome, impact, process) are appropriate to measure adaptation progress?
• How should transformative learning be captured and adaptation targets revised?

These questions, in turn, beget more questions about how to assess adaptation progress over time, how compare progress within and between sectors, and how to allocate resources. Finding answers to these questions offers opportunities to identify synergies, co-benefits, win-win scenarios amongst different actors, working at different scales, to deliver joined-up and effective adaptation.

Scottish Government policy teams face two issues: (i) how to identify their adaptation needs, capacities, and priorities so that they can define bespoke adaptation pathways, objectives, and indicators; and (ii) how to develop usable, accountable, feasible, and scalable adaptation targets, which are also flexible, innovative, meaningful, and support learning.