Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing the World Bank Group ...

CHAPTER 3CLIMATE VARIABILITYdryland and non-dryland locations. Appendix A summarizes information on projectoutcomes, monitoring and evaluation, sustainability, and attention to gender. Of the 20investment projects for which outcome ratings are available, two were highly satisfactory,eight were satisfactory, and seven were moderately satisfactory.3.21 Some of these projects had positive payoffs and increased crop yields, affecting thelivelihoods of households in the project areas. Where reported, the economic returns tothese projects were high, with a median economic rate of return (ERR) of 20 percent andyield increases of 20 percent to 70 percent. However, the quality of monitoring andevaluation varied. Ten projects—likely the better designed and managed—had goodmonitoring and evaluation systems, with baselines and controls, giving more reliableinformation on impacts. The Brazil Third Land Management Project promoted acomprehensive set of natural resource management interventions including minimumtillage. It reported increased yields of 30 percent and incomes of 32 percent in participatingareas compared to nonparticipating areas. Another project, the Santa Catarina NaturalResources Management and Poverty Reduction Project in Brazil, boosted incomes by 10percent to 19 percent relative to control groups. The Karnataka project in India had anexemplary monitoring and evaluation system that not only documented project gains, butprovided real-time feedback on performance that was used to improve the project duringimplementation (Box 3-2).3.22 Most rainfed projects did not provide measures of impacts on soil and water.Several projects used remote sensing to document expansion of ground cover, assumed tocorrelate with erosion benefits or water flows. The Brazil Third Land Management Project(World Bank 2009a) estimated a reduction in topsoil loss of 50 percent or about 120,000 tonsper year. The Loess Plateau project claims to have substantially reduced soil erosion (IEG2007b), but the project-level monitoring and evaluation (M&E) was inadequate. Two Indianprojects reported improvements in groundwater recharge, but measurements lackedadequate controls (IEG 2011a).3.23 It is important to understand the long-term impacts of these interventions. Box 3-3explains why an understanding of hydrological impacts is critical to ensure that projectsand policies are having the desired effect, and are not in fact maladaptive.3.24 These projects would be expected to have strong impacts on poverty and ongender, given links between agriculture and poverty and the often dominant role ofwomen in rainfed agriculture. Poverty was an explicit focus of three of these projects, andimplicitly in most of the others, which generally targeted poor areas. However, only twoprojects measured impacts on poverty incidence. Women play a large and distinctive rolein SLWM. In this portfolio, seven projects had gender goals or reported gender-relatedoutcomes. These were mostly related to microprojects. A Moroccan project initiated in38