Bridging global ambition and local reality: African insights for the future of the Belém Adaptation Indicators

A persistent challenge in global climate governance has been the lack of a coherent, comparable framework for assessing adaptation progress under the Paris Agreement. Unlike mitigation, which benefits from standardized metrics, adaptation remains difficult to measure due to its context-specific nature, diverse sectoral expressions, and uneven national reporting capacities. This gap has constrained global understanding of what constitutes meaningful progress and limited efforts to assess collective outcomes. The adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators at COP30 represents a significant step toward addressing this deficit by providing a structured basis for assessing progress across the eleven global adaptation targets of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience.This viewpoint advances two conceptual propositions. First, measurement justice is necessary to ensure that global indicators do not reproduce disparities in data availability and institutional capacity. Second, context-sensitive operationalization is required to ensure that indicators remain feasible across diverse reporting environments. These propositions frame the analysis of key limitations, including conceptual ambiguity between outcomes and processes, and the reliance on data systems that remain underdeveloped in many countries.African contexts provide an important setting for assessing these challenges. Rather than serving as an exception, they highlight the practical conditions under which the indicators will be implemented, including constraints related to data, institutional capacity and informality. These insights point to the need for capacity-adjusted implementation, strengthened monitoring systems and clearer methodological guidance. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the Belém Adaptation Indicators will depend on whether their operationalization supports a credible, comparable and equitable assessment of progress under the UAE Framework, rather than primarily reflecting differences in reporting capacity across countries.