How to Measure the Impact of Adaptation Strategies

Using Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA)

Choices on climate adaptation impact many different stakeholders with many different interests from monetary to care for each other and the wider natural world. However, most government and corporate decisions are made via cost-benefit-analysis, or an accounting and projection of the costs of any action versus the profits that may ensue. Clearly, this covers only part of what care about so a method has been developed to include more concerns people have and is often used in participatory ways to make decisions more democratic. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) embedded in participatory processes can therefore play an important role in defining the decision context and exploring stakeholders’ preferences. In this paper, a case study on flood protection in the city of Pori in West Finland was conducted. A MCDA workshop with key stakeholders of the region produced a robust ranking of the considered flood protection alternatives. According to the stakeholders, the approach was useful as an exploratory way of gaining a deeper and shared understanding of the flood protection. This suggests MCDA is well suited for decision-making in adaptation to climate change–enhanced extreme events.

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Types of measures

Measures of legitimacy, trust, identity, anxiety, well-being, efficacy, sense of safety, sense of voice, and a willingness to engage

Household insurance

In the Ghanaian context around 80% of people reported being impacted in eight of the areas measured, reflecting the pervasive consequences of this type of flood adaptation on multiple aspects of people’s lives and across domains of wellbeing. A notable anomaly was the impact on the ability of households to get comprehensive household insurance, which reflects only that household insurance is not widespread in Ghana, highlighting the importance of context for deciding key indicators of impact.

Example: Wellbeing budgets

A growing movement worldwide recognises that our economies are not working for people or planet. Alternative approaches such as the idea of an economy which prioritises not profits but people has been called a wellbeing economy. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance gathers movements and individuals working towards this. The Well-Being Economy Alliance of countries use advances in well-being metrics to advocate for a Well-Being Economy Policy Design that should be used to evaluate every major policy area. Wellbeing-oriented budgets for Canada and New Zealand in 2021, for example, both highlight health and social solidarity as explicit goals and advocate for systematic surveillance of appropriate metrics.

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