Climate Change Adaptation and International Organizations, 1990–2017: A New Dataset

This article introduces a new data set on the climate change adaptation activities of international organizations (IOs). While climate change adaptation has been studied at the local level and in the context of major climate organizations, such as UN Climate Change, we focus on both environmental and non-environmental IOs. Previous research has revealed adverse impacts of climate change on issues such as global health, migration and trade, and thus underlined the importance of global governance on these nexuses. Yet existing research has lacked the empirics to map how climate change adaptation is governed outside of the climate regime, and how this varies over time, issue areas, and world regions. Our new data set contains information on governance activities of 31 IOs from 1990 to 2017. Based on this data set, we introduce different types of adaptation activities, compare adaptation in environmental and non-environmental IOs, and develop a first quantitative measure of climate adaptation engagement available at the IO level. This dataset can be used to compare climate change adaptation activities across and within IOs, but also as an empirical foundation for global adaptation governance, for which IO climate change adaptation activities are relevant.