What's the Net-Zero Goal for Climate Adaptation?

By Benjamin DeAngelo | Operation Future | June 2026

The climate mitigation world has a number. Actually, it has several: net-zero by 2050, 2°C of warming, gigatons of CO₂-equivalent reduced. These targets are imperfect and contested, but they do something indispensable — they give governments, investors, companies, and communities a shared language for knowing where the goal posts are, measuring progress, identifying priorities, and holding each other accountable. You can argue about the need to get to net-zero by a certain point in time, or whether a policy is the best way to get to net-zero, but everyone generally understands and agrees on what net-zero means.

Climate adaptation has no equivalent quantitative metric. And that gap, though perhaps not a fatal flaw, presents an obstacle to attracting investment and scaling up our collective response to climate risk.

The metrics problem is global

This is not a shortcoming unique to any one country or community. From the UNFCCC negotiations about country reporting requirements to individual municipalities trying to figure out whether their stormwater investments are working, the adaptation field faces a fundamental measurement challenge: we do not yet have agreed-upon ways to define what success looks like, track progress toward it, or compare performance across contexts.

The Paris Agreement established a Global Goal on Adaptation, but left it deliberately unspecified in terms of targets or indicators. In the United States, a number of states have their own climate action or adaptation plans but few have any quantitative metrics to track progress towards their goals. Multilateral development banks, climate funds like the Green Climate Fund, and national governments have each developed their own frameworks, but these remain largely incompatible with one another, oriented toward project-level accounting rather than systemic change, and heavily weighted toward process and output measures rather than outcome-based metrics that are ultimately sought — is harm being reduced? Are lives being saved? Are people safer? Are valuable assets protected? Is risk declining?

Even countries or communities with dedicated resources and knowhow on this front may not yet be able to quantitatively track everything they’d like to. The UK's Climate Change Committee — operating under a legally-mandated, well-resourced fifteen-year reporting system — found in its most recent progress assessment that nearly 40% of intended adaptation outcomes could not be adequately evaluated because the relevant national datasets simply do not exist.

The CO₂-equivalent analogy

Part of what makes the mitigation world work is that CO₂-equivalent units are, in principle, fungible across sectors, regions and over time. A ton of methane avoided in Pennsylvania natural gas operations is interchangeable with a ton of CO2 avoided through electric vehicles in China. This lets us aggregate, compare, prioritize, and price CO₂-equivalent units. (This is also assisted by basic science because CO2 and other greenhouse gases remain airborne long enough to become globally well mixed so the atmosphere ‘doesn’t care’ where the ton is emitted in terms of long-term climate impacts.)

Climate adaptation doesn't have that. A heat-resilient neighborhood in Philadelphia, a flood-proofed road in rural Pakistan, and a drought-tolerant seed variety distributed to smallholder farmers in Punjab are all forms of adaptation — but they don’t lend themselves to a common and comparable unit or metric. This is not merely a technical inconvenience. It means that adaptation investments cannot easily be compared, aggregated into portfolios, or evaluated against alternative uses of scarce resources. 

Do we need a single metric like net-zero or fungible units like CO2 equivalents? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it would be feasible or even useful to try to boil something down like that in the climate adaptation world. But I think we do need a more common set of metrics that can meet the needs of different stakeholders for adaptation and resilience actions in different sectors.

What early adopters are learning

A handful of jurisdictions and institutions are ahead of the curve, and their experience is instructive.

Massachusetts has built one of the more sophisticated state-level resilience tracking systems in the United States. Its ResilientMass framework organizes metrics across four tiers — inputs, process, outputs, and outcomes — mapped to the state's adaptation priorities. The honest lesson from Massachusetts is that even with genuine institutional commitment, most of what is actually trackable today sits in the process and output tiers. The outcome metrics — is flood damage declining? Are vulnerable communities safer? — remain limited, data-constrained, and hard to attribute to specific adaptation investments.

The United Kingdom's experience underscores the same point at a national scale, and adds a sobering dimension: even after fifteen years of legally-mandated reporting with substantial government resources, large fractions of adaptation outcomes remain unmeasurable for lack of data.

These are not arguments against measurement — they are arguments for starting now, being honest about what we can and cannot yet measure, and building toward the outcome-oriented systems we need over time.

Why this matters now

There is an urgency to this problem. Our climate continues to change rapidly yet climate adaptation remains chronically underfinanced, receiving only USD 26 billion in international public flows in 2023 against estimated needs of USD 310–365 billion annually by 2035 according to UNEP. Current climate adaptation spending (even federal spending in the United States that survived the clawbacks of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funds) is occurring without credible metrics to evaluate effectiveness, outcomes and returns on investment. The lack of commonly used metrics may also be presenting a barrier to attracting the private capital that would be needed to match the scale of the challenge.

There is also an equity dimension that metrics cannot ignore. Adaptation benefits and burdens are not distributed evenly. Without outcome metrics disaggregated by income and community vulnerability, it is impossible to know whether adaptation investments are reaching the communities that need them most — or whether they are systematically bypassing them.

What I am working on

I recently presented on this challenge and the need for improved metrics in the context of Pennsylvania’s climate action plan and am looking into this challenge internationally at the project scale. The problem looks somewhat different in each setting, but the underlying question is the same — how do we build the measurement infrastructure that would let us answer, at any meaningful scale, "are we actually becoming more resilient?"

If you are working on climate adaptation planning, resilience investment, or climate finance — whether at the state or local level, internationally, or in the private sector — I would welcome the conversation. 

Benjamin DeAngelo is the founder of Operation Future, LLC a climate strategy and advisory practice, adjunct professor at Howard University, and former Director of EPA’s Office of Climate Adaptation and Sustainability. He can be reached at ben.deangelo@operationfuture.net.