This project aims to understand how GAP-track might help to assess adaptation progress and reduce adaptation gaps at the urban scale in two South African metropolitan municipalities. We propose to test how the GAP Track tool can be used at the urban scale to structure a qualitative assessment of adaptation progress, especially in a way that helps to identify priorities for working to reduce key gaps, using the cases of water-related adaptation efforts to reduce flood, drought and coastal erosion risks in two South African metros, Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay.

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The GAP-Track flower, depicting the assessment domains of the Global Adaptation Progress Tracker (GAP-Track) tool. Source: https://www.iddri.org/en/project/assessing-global-progress-climate-adaptation-gap-track

Objectives 

  1. Shift from using GAP-track as a purely scientific tool, as it has been in the past, to one that is more policy- and practice-oriented.

  2. Bring together diverse stakeholders to build a shared framework for assessing adaptation at the urban scale that integrates multiple scientific, policy, practitioner and lived experience perspectives.

  3. Build capacity amongst stakeholders involved in climate adaptation, enhancing the coherence of adaptation assessments from urban to national and global levels.

  4. Identify adaptation gaps and ways to support addressing them through the project. 

  5. If suitable, repeat the use of GAP-track a second time after 2 years to assess progress and the ability of the tool to capture change over relatively short time-steps.

Background

The last decade has seen a shift from assessing climate risks and vulnerabilities to developing climate action plans and designing and implementing adaptation projects that aim to adapt in a way that reduces climate risk, especially for the most vulnerable. Given this shift from planning to implementation of adaptation interventions, it is critical to understand what progress has been made and where the adaptation gaps remain (Ford and Berrang-Ford, 2016). It is important that the implementers, co-designers, stakeholders, funders and intended beneficiaries know if/where the climate risks and vulnerabilities are decreasing or increasing (whether as a result of the interventions, changes in the hazards, or other factors), where and by whom co-benefits are being realised, what trade-offs are being experienced, and losses and damages are being accrued, by whom, despite the adaptation efforts and international support (Eriksen et al. 2021). A review of the scientific and policy literature, rooted in theories of adaptive management and adaptive governance, reveals mounting calls for such adaptation efficacy-related data, information and knowledge, but limited empirical evidence exists of it being done in various contexts and at various scales (Leiter, 2021). 

One way this is being attempted is through developing and measuring indicators of adaptation progress. Internationally, through the UNFCCC, efforts are underway to compile standardised indicators to measure progress against the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and related process and sector-based targets (Biesbroek et al. 2025). For these high-level indicators to provide meaningful, actionable insights, global monitoring and reporting exercises need to be complemented and aligned with sub-national, localised processes of determining relevant metrics and gathering a range of suitable evidence in consistent and sustainable ways. This can help to overcome costly exercises, producing crude snapshots of climate risks and adaptation progress and gaps based on poor proxies and scant data sources to fulfil a check-box requirement for upward reporting.

In South Africa, the national government is in the process of compiling a set of indicators to assess progress on adaptation efforts countrywide. Indicators have limitations and need to be treated with caution. They can be resource-intensive to gather the necessary data, which poses many difficulties for most developing countries, where government and scientific capacities in terms of human resources, monitoring networks, data processing and management systems are very limited as compared with many global North counterparts. In addition to problems with administering indicators, the selected indicators also often fail to adequately capture the complexity of climate adaptation processes and outcomes (Magnan et al, 2025). Although necessary to engage with ongoing processes of developing adaptation indicators globally and nationally, it is important to develop alternative approaches that adequately capture adaptation progress and address the challenges of indicators. Approaches are needed to bring in rich qualitative perspectives from the ground up on what progress is being made at the local level.

The structured elicitation and use of expert judgement is a promising methodology to capture progress and some of the relevant complexity of adaptation (Magnan et al, 2025). One expert judgement method that has been developed is the Global Adaptation Progress Tracker, known as GAP-Track. GAP-Track is a structured expert elicitation method to assess adaptation progress based on 6 domains: knowledge about current and future climate risks (Q1), planning (Q2), action (Q3), capacities (Q4), evidence towards reducing climate risks (Q5) and long-term pathway strategies (Q6). The method draws on local expert knowledge to capture the place-based nature of adaptation.

Project location

The City of Cape Town (CCT) and Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) in South Africa have been selected for the application of this methodology because both are coastal metropolitan municipalities in semi-arid climates that have recently faced severe water stress, as well as coastal climate-related risks of inundation, erosion and salinisation. Nelson Mandela Bay is the metropolitan municipality containing the city of Gqeberha (previously named Port Elizabeth), as well as the neighbouring towns of Uitenhage and Despatch. 

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The two cities have different track records in explicitly tackling issues of climate change adaptation. Cape Town is one of the forerunners of climate adaptation planning and implementation in South Africa, having begun in the early 2000s, with an early focus on sea-level rise and coastal risks associated with climate change. Sector-based adaptation planning was undertaken (as documented in Taylor, 2016) and the CCT approved a comprehensive Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan in 2021, associated with annual progress reporting. NMB began planning to manage climate-related risks at the metropolitan municipal scale more recently with a vulnerability assessment conducted in 2015 and undertook a participatory process that concluded in 2025 to establish a Climate Resilient Development Strategy Framework and Resilience Action Plan. Both cities have expressed strategic intent to reduce climate risks through fostering adaptation, and thereby a need to track progress.

Team

ACDI in Cape Town: Prof Gina Ziervogel, Dr Anna Taylor, Songo Benya

NMB collaborators: Belinda Clark, Abigail Kamineth, Therese Boulle 

Funders and Partners

The project is working in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan municipality and the City of Cape Town. This project is funded by French Development Agency (the Agence Française de Développement, AFD). 

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