How do we know that climate projects actually work?

As climate change intensifies and resources remain limited, the stakes for getting climate mitigation and adaptation projects right only increase. How do we know if they’re making a difference?

Climate change projects come in many shapes: expanding renewable energy, promoting energy efficiency, halting deforestation, restoring degraded land, improving water management, supporting vulnerable communities. These initiatives don’t exist in a vacuum. A project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a rural area isn’t just about installing energy-efficient equipment; it’s entangled with water scarcity, land degradation, local politics, economic constraints, cultural factors, and conflict over resources. Add in extreme weather events, government budget cuts, and community skepticism, and you have a recipe for complexity that can derail even well-designed initiatives.

This is precisely what makes monitoring and evaluation (M&E) so critical. We need to understand how to induce lasting, transformative change. M&E is not just about how projects track progress, but it’s also about learning from experience and adapting to changing realities. Strong M&E can make the difference in whether a project not only produces its outputs but actually makes an impact. Evaluation also helps to learn and transfer lessons to future projects, policies and strategies.

We examined three Global Environment Facility (GEF) projects for insights into what separates climate initiatives that succeed from those that stumble. In our study, we focused on the role of M&E.

What M&E really does

Monitoring and evaluation are often misunderstood as compliance exercises: reporting outputs to donors or justifying budgets (or finding reasons for cutting those budgets). In practice, they can be much more powerful.

Monitoring asks whether activities are on track producing their outputs on time and on budget, while evaluation asks deeper questions: Are the assumptions valid? Was the intervention design appropriate? Are we reaching the right people? Is the intervention leading to a meaningful change in the problem that it targeted? What unintended effects are emerging? What needs to change – for this project and for further initiatives?

For climate action, these questions are critical. Climate projects operate at the intersection of human systems (institutions, livelihoods, politics, culture) and natural systems (land, water, ecosystems, weather). Both are complex and unpredictable. Without strong M&E, project managers are flying blind.

 Three countries, three different M&E stories

 We examined projects in three countries facing severe climate pressures. The experiences from Mali, Nepal, and Uzbekistan illustrate how M&E can either strengthen or weaken climate interventions.

Mali: navigating through multiple chappenges

In Mali, the project aimed to help communities adopt sustainable land and water management practices. In this West African drought-prone country, the context was extraordinarily challenging: widespread poverty, land degradation, insecure tenure, political instability, and conflict-driven displacement. The project’s theory was straightforward: give people alternative livelihoods and training, and they’ll stop practices that degrade the land. Reality proved messier. Political instability displaced thousands of people into project areas already under demographic pressure. Communities feared displacement and questioned whether promised benefits would materialize.

The project’s M&E system tracked activities and gathered feedback from communities, helping managers adjust implementation along the way. Importantly, it supported downward accountability, giving local stakeholders a voice and improving transparency.

Yet capacity constraints, funding shortages, and instability limited data quality and continuity. While M&E helped keep the project moving, its longer-term sustainability remained fragile, especially once external funding ended.

Nepal: M&E as a strategic asset

Nepal’s renewable energy project tells a different story. Working through an established national agency, the project expanded off-grid renewable energy in rural areas while supporting livelihoods and reducing emissions, achieving highly satisfactory results. Solar systems and micro-hydro grids reached communities that had never had reliable electricity.

A clear success factor was the exemplary M&E system that detected problems early, enabled quick corrections, and kept all stakeholders informed and engaged. Regular reporting built trust; continuous assessment provided insights that guided smart decision-making. Here, M&E was not an afterthought. Continuous data collection and analysis allowed problems to be identified early and corrected. Stakeholders trusted the process because reporting was consistent and transparent.

As a result, the project delivered strong results and built durable capacity that continued beyond the project’s lifetime.

Uzbekistan: ambition meets weak feedback loops

In Uzbekistan, the project aimed to introduce renewable energy technologies and combat land degradation in a country facing severe climate-related development challenges, such as drought and ecological degradation. The goals were ambitious, and the rationale strong: high emissions intensity, water scarcity, and land degradation posed major risks to rural development.

External shocks – extreme weather, economic volatility, institutional bottlenecks – undermined results. The M&E system provided valuable information, but capacity gaps and funding constraints limited its effectiveness. While some course correction occurred, inconsistent data collection, and delayed analysis and reporting hampered adaptive management and limited the project’s ability to respond effectively to challenges.

What can we learn from these contrasting experiences?

Lessons

The Nepal project offers the clearest blueprint for success. Its M&E system didn’t just collect data — it created a feedback loop that kept the project aligned with objectives, allowed real-time adjustments, and built transparency that fostered trust among government agencies, implementing partners, and local communities.

In contrast, both the Mali and Uzbekistan projects struggled with capacity issues. Local partners lacked the skills or tools for consistent data collection. External funding dependency meant that even successful monitoring systems faced uncertain futures once international support ended.

What all three projects revealed was that external factors often matter more than internal project design. Political instability in Mali, extreme weather events in Uzbekistan, and changing government priorities in all three countries shaped outcomes as much as any project activity. A good M&E system doesn’t just track what the project is doing. It monitors the broader landscape in which the project operates.

Without timely, reliable information, even well-designed climate projects can lose momentum and impact. When M&E is well-designed and adequately resourced, it becomes a management tool, not just a reporting requirement. Even under challenging conditions, M&E can support adaptive management but it cannot substitute for institutional capacity and domestic financing.

Why theory of change matters

Across all three cases, one insight stands out: a clear theory of change matters. A theory of change explicitly maps how activities are expected to lead to outcomes and longer-term impacts, while identifying key assumptions and risks. For climate projects, this is especially important because success depends on factors beyond the project’s control, including policies, markets, social norms, and climate variability itself. A strong theory of change forces project designers and implementers to articulate their assumptions and identify the risks (internal and external) that could break the chain. It is also essential to identify potential unintended consequences: to the environment and to various groups of people, especially the most vulnerable groups, including women and Indigenous peoples.

For instance, the Mali project assumed that providing alternative livelihoods would reduce pressure on natural resources. The theory-of-change approach made it clear that this depended on secure land tenure, effective governance, community buy-in, predictable climate conditions, and political security. When instability disrupted these conditions, the M&E system could flag the problem and suggest adaptations.

When embedded in M&E systems, theory-based approaches help teams ask the right questions: Are external conditions shifting? Which assumptions no longer hold? Where are unintended consequences emerging? This makes adaptive management and learning systematic rather than ad hoc.

From accountability to learning and back again

The GEF Independent Evaluation Office assesses the design and performance of M&E in the Facility-funded projects. The experience shows steady improvement in M&E quality over time: 84 percent of recent projects now have satisfactory M&E design, up from 69 percent historically. Newer projects are better designed, use clearer indicators, and place greater emphasis on learning.

Still, challenges remain. Too often M&E is underfunded and capacity to implement the systems is inadequate. As climate impacts intensify, projects must continuously adapt. That requires credible data, analytical capacity, and institutional willingness to learn. It also requires M&E to be flexible and timely.

What this means for future climate action

Three practical implications emerge from our review:

1. Invest early in M&E capacity, especially at national and local levels.
2. Use theory-based evaluation to navigate complexity and uncertainty.
3. Treat M&E as a management function, not just an accountability mechanism.

Climate change is not a linear problem. Effective responses cannot rely on fixed plans and static indicators. They require feedback, learning, and adjustment over time. How we monitor and evaluate climate action may determine whether good intentions translate into lasting impact.

The most vulnerable countries and communities often have the weakest capacity for monitoring and evaluation. Climate finance frequently flows through short-term projects that end before long-term impacts can be assessed. And the interconnected nature of environmental problems – climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, water scarcity, access to resources, inequality, policies, markets – demands integrated approaches that are inherently harder to monitor.

The good news? We’re learning. These three case studies show that even in difficult circumstances, strong M&E systems can guide climate projects toward better outcomes. They help identify what works, for whom, and under what conditions. They build accountability and trust. And they generate lessons that can inform future efforts.

In the fight against climate change, measuring progress isn’t bureaucratic overhead. It is essential infrastructure for success.

[This piece draws upon an article written by Juha I. Uitto and Peter H. Koehn and published in Public Organization Review in 2025. The blog was originally published in https://juhuitto.substack.com on 1 February 2026.]