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Adaptive policies have emerged as a valuable strategy for dealing with uncertainties by recognising the capacity of systems to adapt over time to new circumstances and surprises. The efficacy of adaptive policies hinges on detecting on-going change and ensuring that actions are indeed taken if and when necessary. This is operationalised by including a monitoring system composed of signposts and triggers in the design of the plan. A well-designed monitoring system is indispensable for the effective implementation of adaptive policies. Despite the importance of monitoring for adaptive policies, the present literature has not considered criteria enabling the a-priori evaluation of the efficacy of signposts. In this paper, we introduce criteria for the evaluation of individual signposts and the monitoring system as a whole. These criteria are relevance, observability, completeness, and parsimony. These criteria are intended to enhance the capacity to detect the need for adaptation in the presence of noisy and ambiguous observations of the real system. The criteria are identified from an analysis of the information chain, from system observations to policy success, focusing on how data becomes information. We illustrate how models, in particular, the combined use of stochastic and exploratory modelling can be used to assess individual signposts, and the whole monitoring system according to these criteria. This analysis provides significant insight into critical factors that may hinder learning from data. The proposed criteria are demonstrated using a hypothetical case, in which a monitoring system for a flood protection policy in the Niger River is designed and tested.

Sustainable water management in a changing environment full of uncertainty is profoundly challenging. To deal with these uncertainties, dynamic adaptive policies that can be changed over time are suggested. This paper presents a model-driven approach supporting the development of promising adaptation pathways, and illustrates the approach using a hypothetical case.We use robust optimization over uncertainties related to climate change, land use, cause-effect relations, and policy efficacy, to identify the most promising pathways. For this purpose, we generate an ensemble of possible futures and evaluate candidate pathways over this ensemble using an Integrated Assessment Meta Model. We understand ‘most promising’ in terms of the robustness of the performance of the candidate pathways on multiple objectives, and use a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to find the set of most promising pathways. This results in an adaptation map showing the set of most promising adaptation pathways and options for transferring from one pathway to another. Given the pathways and signposts, decision-makers can make an informed decision on a dynamic adaptive plan in a changing environment that is able to achieve their intended objectives despite the myriad of uncertainties.