Author: Burcu Dagurkuden, Regional Technical Specialist, Climate Adaptation and Resilient Societies, UNDP
For many countries, submitting a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to the UNFCCC marks an important milestone in their climate adaptation journey. But producing a plan is not the end of the process – it’s only the beginning.
Once a NAP is in place, the real challenge begins, that is, turning priorities on paper into action in a complex and changing context. That is rarely a straightforward process, and every country's experience is different. Yet one thing is increasingly clear: success depends not only on identifying the right climate adaptation priorities, but on creating the systems that allow those priorities to evolve over time.
Two elements are particularly important. First, countries need strong coordination mechanisms that bring the right institutions together and provide clear roles, responsibilities and accountability.
Second, they need to adopt adaptive management, with the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances without losing sight of long-term adaptation goals.
Together, these two elements can help transform NAPs from planning documents into living frameworks that can guide climate action over time. In doing so, they help build the enabling environment for adaptation — creating the governance, coordination and institutional foundations that endure beyond any single plan or project.
Over the past decade, through its support to more than 45 countries under the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Readiness Preparatory Support Programme, UNDP has worked alongside governments across diverse political systems, socio-economic contexts and institutional structures, gaining valuable insight into what enables successful implementation of NAPs.
Three lessons consistently emerge.
A strong coordination mechanism creates the foundation for adaptation
Climate adaptation planning is unlike most public policy challenges because it cuts across almost every part of government as well as multiple sectors. Agriculture, water, health, infrastructure, finance, environment, disaster risk management and local government all have responsibilities for building resilience. Without a clear way for these institutions to work together, adaptation efforts can quickly become siloed, with overlapping priorities, duplicated efforts and missed opportunities.
This is why establishing a coordination mechanism is one of the most important foundations in NAP implementation.
A coordination mechanism is far more than a steering committee or a government meeting. It provides a governance structure for ministries and other institutions to make decisions, agree on priorities, monitor progress and coordinate implementation across sectors. It also helps ensure that adaptation is integrated into broader development planning rather than remaining the responsibility of a single ministry. There is no one-size-fits-all.
In Lebanon, existing institutions are being strengthened rather than replaced. The country has built on mechanisms that were already supporting other national climate processes, including the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), the Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) and the Adaptation Communication. Bringing these processes together has created stronger institutional ownership while helping different sectors develop more coherent, measurable and realistic climate priorities.
As Lebanon's adaptation priorities have become more clearly defined and coordinated, they have also begun attracting growing interest from development partners and climate finance providers. The country is now better positioned to translate those priorities into an emerging pipeline of adaptation investments, demonstrating how stronger governance helps turn planning into implementation.
We’ve seen other countries take different approaches.
In Morocco, the emphasis has been on strengthening coordination between national and regional government institutions, so that adaptation priorities identified at the local level feed into national planning, the NDC and sectoral strategies. Regular engagement with stakeholders, including local decision-makers and young people, has helped ensure that local priorities continue to inform national decision-making while maintaining broad ownership of the process.
Kazakhstan, meanwhile, is developing its coordination arrangements within a governance system where the process is led at the national level, with sectoral institutions having established channels in place to take local inputs into account.
Successful coordination is not about copying what works elsewhere. It’s about ensuring that every country has a mechanism that reflects its own governance system, while enabling institutions to work towards a shared adaptation agenda.
Coordination provides stability. Adaptive management provides flexibility.
Building a coordination mechanism is only the first step. Climate adaptation also requires governments to remain flexible as circumstances change.
As climate risks change, new evidence emerges and financing opportunities arise, the way adaptation is implemented must evolve in response. This is where adaptive management becomes essential. Adaptive management does not mean continually redesigning a NAP or changing institutional structures every time circumstances change. Instead, it builds on the stability provided by a strong coordination mechanism, allowing implementation to adapt while roles, responsibilities and decision-making arrangements remain clear.
As new opportunities emerge, countries can adjust priorities, change the sequence of investments, strengthen engagement with stakeholders, or incorporate new evidence, all while continuing to work within an agreed national framework. In this way, adaptive management helps ensure that NAPs remain practical, relevant and responsive.
When UNDP's GCF Readiness project began in India, work on the country's NAP was already well underway through existing national efforts. Rather than continuing with the original project design, support shifted to reflect the country's changing needs. The focus shifted from helping to formulate the NAP to strengthening its implementation, while national institutions assumed leadership for developing sectoral priorities using their own expertise, mandates and data.
This flexible approach also strengthened country ownership. Instead of relying heavily on external consultants, national institutions took responsibility for shaping adaptation priorities within their own sectors, creating stronger institutional capacity needed to deliver adaptation over the long term.
India is now building on these foundations through the development of a national climate platform to help prioritize investments, assess project feasibility, strengthen coordination and better connect planning with finance. India’s NAP shows how large and highly decentralized countries may require multiple layers of coordination that develop as implementation advances.
Experience helps countries find the right approach
No two countries approach adaptation planning in the same way. We’ve seen this in differing political systems, institutional mandates and in different decision-making cultures. Even neighboring countries facing similar climate risks over a shared border will often require different coordination arrangements because their governments operate differently.
This diversity is one of the greatest strengths of the NAP process. Rather than promoting a standard model, effective support is about helping countries ask the right questions. Which institutions need to be involved? Who should make decisions? How should accountability be shared? How can adaptation priorities be integrated across sectors? And how can coordination remain effective as implementation progresses?
This is where experience becomes valuable.
Through decades of adaptation support, UNDP has accumulated experience across a wide range of governance systems and development contexts. Among more than 170 GCF delivery partners, UNDP supports the largest share of GCF resources dedicated to NAPs, representing more than a third of the portfolio.
The value of this experience lies not simply in its scale, but the practical experience it has generated. That experience helps inform advice that is grounded not in theory, but in lessons from countries that have already navigated similar challenges.
NAPs are becoming one of the world's most important tools for strengthening climate resilience. However, their greatest value is not the document itself, but in the systems they help create. For many countries, it is also the guiding document for delivering the adaptation priorities set out in their Nationally Determined Contribution.
Through the process of developing and implementing a NAP, countries build the institutions, relationships and governance systems needed to sustain adaptation over the long term. Strong coordination mechanisms provide the stability to align institutions and guide implementation, while adaptive management enables countries to respond to changing circumstances without losing the sight of long term goals. In the end, the lasting legacy of a National Adaptation Plan is not simply the plan itself, but the stronger institutions and systems it leaves behind. The plan is only the beginning.