By Byron Ruby, John Gardner Fellow at the U.S. Department of State, Office of Global Change

In 2010, Costa Rica, Spain, and the United States announced they would establish a global Adaptation Partnership to help catalyse action and foster communication among the various institutions and actors engaged in building climate resilience around the world. The Partnership now includes 23 countries, and has undertaken a number of activities to establish communities of practice on adaptation. The activities of the Partnership are described here.

As part of this effort, the Adaptation Partnership commissioned the International Institute for Sustainable Development to conduct a review of current and planned adaptation activities across Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Partner countries recognised that the review could assist practitioners, policy-makers, and donors in identifying both the gaps in global adaptation and any opportunities to scale up and enhance collaboration.

After a year and a half of research, the review is finally complete. Totalling more than 2,000 pages and covering 125 different countries, the review is the most comprehensive snapshot of adaptation activities from a single source. It has been broken into 12 smaller, more manageable documents available for download here.

Broadly speaking, the bulk of the information included in this review falls under one of the following categories – an assessment of: (1) adaptation needs and priorities, as identified by the countries themselves; (2) national level policies and strategic documents concerning climate change adaptation; (3) current adaptation actions (including who’s funding the project, which sectors are being addressed, who’s doing the implementing, etc.); and (4) proposed adaptation actions.

So if you’re curious about the regional-level actions that are being proposed for Central Asia, or need to find out about the identified adaptation needs of a country like Benin, or would just simply like to know how and by whom agricultural issues are being addressed in Mali, you’ll find these a useful starting point.

Picture: OneWorldUK - The 5th Annual Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change Conference, Dhaka in Bangladesh