Guidelines to Climate Mitigation Evaluations

The guidelines for climate mitigation evaluations are intended to clarify some of the persistent evaluation and measurement issues associated with climate mitigation interventions. The Climate-Eval Community of Practice is hosted by the Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility. The online platform houses an electronic library which has a collection of more than 500 evaluations on the project, program, policy and portfolio level. The Community of Practice also conducts online discussions and webinars and is represented at international conferences.

This paper is a contribution towards solving some of the persistent methodological questions by formulating guidelines facing climate change mitigation evaluation. It has a focus on a theory-based approach for evaluating mitigation interventions, but pays heed to a number of these challenges which have been discussed in the online discussion forum of the website of the community. Its foundations have been laid by Zubiri (2012).

The paper deals with a number of conceptual and practical challenges that will be discussed in the further sections of this introduction. Section 2 then discusses the various geographic scales of climate mitigation interventions. Section 3 elaborates on different concepts of GHG emissions accounting. In section 4 the application of the OECD DAC criteria on climate change projects is discussed. Section 5 presents a theory of change that has been developed in the context of the Climate-Eval Community of Practice.