ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the increasingly damaging effects of climate change on the global environment and observes that it is the poor, who are most severely challenged by this trend. “Weather-related events” are increasing in frequency and severity under climate change and in regions such as Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean disaster risk is outpacing resilience, posing severe limitations on poverty reduction. Many international interventions attempt to address the overlaps between climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction within a poverty reduction framework. Evaluation among international agencies has struggled to assess the progress and results of these efforts, given their exceptional complexity. While theory-based evaluation approaches have proved useful, they have often failed to find a suitable level of theory, which can provide clear findings and actionable lessons and recommendations. This chapter recommends an approach in which different levels of theory, from project through to the global environment, can be “nested” within each other, so that each addresses a specific aspect, while contributing towards evaluation of higher levels of social and environmental change.
