In recent decades, climate- and weather-related extremes have intensified, driving disproportionate losses for vulnerable populations and heightening demand for robust climate information and early warning systems. Despite substantial investments by climate funds and development partners, the landscape of CIEWS support remains fragmented, inconsistently defined and difficult to monitor across institutions. In this context, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) mandated its Independent Evaluation Unit (IEU) to carry out a strategic evaluation of the Fund’s approach to and portfolio of CIEWS interventions, with a factual draft report produced in October 2025.
In response, the IEU commissioned Integrated Risk Management Associates (IRMA) and partners to generate an evidence base that can guide future CIEWS financing and programming across the GCF and partner portfolios.
The evaluation aimed to:
- Develop a practical definition and theory of change for CIEWS that the GCF can apply consistently in project tagging, design, monitoring and learning.
- Assess the GCF’s approach to CIEWS, including its collaboration with core technical actors (EW4All partners such as WMO, UNDRR, ITU and IFRC) and its use of instruments like Readiness, the Project Preparation Facility and simplified approval processes.
- Analyse the funded portfolio of CIEWS-related projects to understand how they perform on relevance, effectiveness, impact, sustainability, gender equality, innovation, scalability and unexpected results.
The evaluation used mixed methods, combining a structured portfolio review with field and institutional evidence. The methods included:
- A systematic tagging and refinement of GCF projects, leading to an analytically defined set of 132 “GCF‑tagged CIEWS projects”.
- An in-depth cluster analysis of 40 sampled projects using funding proposals, Annual Performance Reports and mid-term evaluations to explore effectiveness and impacts where portfolio-level indicators were insufficient.
- Qualitative work through literature and document review, key informant interviews, focus group discussions and country missions to Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, Uzbekistan and Guatemala, complemented by remote engagement in Nigeria.
A core output of the assignment was an operational definition of CIEWS adapted to the GCF context. For this evaluation, CIEWS is understood as a set of interconnected systems that collect, analyse and communicate climate and weather information, and that translate this into timely, actionable warnings to protect lives, livelihoods, assets and investments. A project is therefore considered a CIEWS initiative only when it intentionally constructs, strengthens or promotes climate information services or warning systems, rather than simply using existing forecasts or infrastructure.
The deliverables publicly available to date include the CIEWS Approach Paper, the CIEWS Approach Brief, and the CIEWS Final Report.
IRMA’s team for this assignment included Lezlie C. Morinière, Fernanda Zermoglio, Katiuscia Fara and Sayel Cortes.
Photo of Fleur on Unsplash.
