As climate-related risks increase, strengthening the monitoring of climate policies is becoming imperative, not only to improve the effectiveness of the response to the adverse effects of climate change but also to pursue the global climate agenda.

While methodologies are well defined for the monitoring of mitigation, they remain a greenfield for adaptation. The intrinsic complexity of adaptation, its context-specific nature, and the absence of comprehensive datasets have been critical barriers to the definition of monitoring and evaluation tools and their upscaling/replicability across time/space.

While the effects of climate change are not confined to national boundaries, adaptation actions are mostly implemented at the local level. Recognizing its international dimension, the Paris Agreement put forward a “global goal for adaptation,” for which measuring progress is key to foster long-term climate-resilient development. However, the aggregate dimension of adaptation is hard to track due to its context-specific nature and the lack of comparable information.

Earth Observation data, supported by data from Citizen Science initiatives and other sources of Big Data, appear to be a cornerstone for assessing progress on adaptation, especially in data-scarce regions. The extent to which these sources can be combined to effectively track long-term policy objectives is understudied and is addressed in this chapter.

We review advances in the use of Earth Observations, key initiatives, and practices to analyze their success in providing ex ante, near real-time, and ex post information for adaptation. Conclusions identify the potential for applying EO to international monitoring systems, informing the Paris Agreement’s global stocktake to measure and inform global resilience.