Skills assessment for National Adaptation Planning - how countries can identify the gap

When climate change was first recognized as a threat to national development goals, capacity building efforts were mainly focused on understanding the science as well as developing national policy and institutional frameworks for climate change. As awareness of the risks has increased and become experience based, it has become evident that a broader range of skills and capacities are required.

This paper offers a way of assessing the skills gap that a country may have in designing and implementing a national adaptation plan. To achieve this it proposes a skills assessment framework, to complement the NAP Technical Guidelines (UNFCCC, 2012), specifically Element A on “Initiating and Launching the NAP Process”.