A new tool for assessing climate adaptation planning quality, applied to more than 2,000 climate action plans, reveals consistent patterns in how cities structure climate adaptation, and where performance varies.
Cities and urban areas have taken on a key role in addressing climate impacts and risks, and yet metrics to assess adaptation progress so far have been lacking.
Now a new study introduces ADAQA-GCoM, a tool designed to assess the quality of urban climate adaptation plans submitted to the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM). The framework adapts the earlier ADAQA assessment model, developed in 2023 for evaluating urban adaptation plans across European cities, to the GCoM reporting system.
Applied to 2,205 Climate Action Plans produced between 2007 and 2024, this provides one of the largest standardised assessments of urban climate adaptation planning, to date. The study demonstrates the usefulness of such a comparative framework in helping cities around the world achieve more coherent, transparent and effective climate adaptation planning.
Gap in measuring climate adaptation planning quality
Climate adaptation is often difficult to measure because it is location-specific, and strategies must be tailored to local conditions and policy goals. As a result, evaluating whether adaptation plans are effective has remained a long-standing challenge in climate governance.
The ADAQA-GCoM framework addresses this gap by assessing plans across six components: climate risk information (Fact Base), adaptation goals, adaptation measures, implementation arrangements, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and participation, alongside checks for internal consistency.
This approach enables the study authors, including Tyndall Centre’s Oliver Heidrich, to compare how cities structure climate adaptation planning, rather than measuring adaptation outcomes – offering a systematic view of planning quality at scale.
Monitoring and plan coherence
One of the key findings is that cities that perform well in one area of climate adaptation planning tend to perform well across others, indicating a degree of clustering between components. This is particularly evident in the relationship between implementation and adaptation measures, which are strongly linked.
By contrast, monitoring and evaluation stands out as the least connected component across the dataset. It is not statistically correlated with other elements of planning, suggesting it does not consistently integrate with wider adaptation frameworks.
Overall, the analysis identifies both variation and structure: while performance differs across cities, certain components tend to move together in predictable ways.
Imbalance between action and measurement
Across the dataset, cities generally perform strongly in identifying climate risks and setting out adaptation actions. Most plans include climate projections, identify responsible authorities, and set implementation timelines. Around 85% name implementing bodies, and 88% set out timelines for delivery.
However, weaker performance emerges in goal setting and monitoring.
While 74% of cities include at least one adaptation goal, only 20% link those goals to specific climate hazards, and many lack measurable or quantitative targets. Just 32% allocate a specific budget for adaptation, 9% submit monitoring reports on time, and 7% actively track their goals. Reporting on outcomes remains limited across the dataset.
The study identifies a clear structural imbalance in adaptation planning, where cities place greater emphasis on implementation than on systems for evaluating whether those actions are effective over time.
The study also finds that vulnerable populations are frequently underrepresented within adaptation planning, with many plans failing to account for vulnerable groups or align proposed actions with their needs.
City size does not explain performance differences
One of the study’s more notable findings is that city size and national context show no significant association with adaptation plan quality. Larger cities do not consistently outperform smaller municipalities, and performance varies widely across all size categories.
High-scoring climate plans are rare. More than half of all cities do not achieve high scores in any planning component, while only a small number perform strongly across several areas.
All of this suggests that climate adaptation planning quality is more likely to depend on institutional capacity and governance arrangements. The GCoM framework may also help reduce differences linked to local capacity constraints.
Regional differences in climate adaptation planning
The analysis finds clear spatial clustering in climate adaptation planning quality. Cities within the same regions often produce similar types of plans, particularly in Belgium and parts of Italy. In these cases, regional governance arrangements appear to contribute to more consistent planning outcomes. Belgian Covenant Coordinators provide technical and organisational support to municipalities, while in Sicily, regional authorities have coordinated funding processes linked to plan approval.
By contrast, Spain shows much greater variation, suggesting that where regional coordination is weaker, local political and institutional factors play a larger role in shaping outcomes.
Overall, stronger regional governance networks are linked to more consistent adaptation planning and higher scores across some components.
Implications for climate governance
Many cities still lack robust systems for assessing whether adaptation actions are effective over time.
At the same time, cities with stronger implementation structures tend to produce more internally consistent adaptation plans.
For policymakers, this highlights a shift: effective adaptation is not only about delivering actions, but also about building coherent systems that consistently define, track, and evaluate those actions over time. The study calls for clearer global standards in the goal setting of climate adaptation plans, in order to help cities translate adaptation goals into effective action.
Related links
- Read the journal article in npj Urban Sustainability (2026): ‘Unveiling patterns in the quality and consistency of climate adaptation plans of the Global Covenant of Mayors‘ by authors Filomena Pietrapertosa et al
- Learn about our research theme: ‘Catalysing adaptation and resilience‘
- See our news story: ‘Delivering climate risk data that is useful to local adaptation decision makers‘
