The Extent of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies Implementation

Abstract

Climate change and its impacts have escalated in recent decades, and its effects have been felt throughout the globe, making it a global concern and a major issue of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 (climate action), which calls for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. In response to this, many nations have developed policies to implement climate strategies through Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and other specific multi-sectoral climate policies. Despite this, the extent to which these strategies are implemented and their transformative effect has been underexplored. A systematic literature review was conducted to address the research question using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) from academic databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar and a thematic synthesis revealed patterns in the literature. Implementation of climate strategies remains uneven, fragmented, pilot-scale and predominantly reactive rather than transformative, despite increased adoption of climate policies and planning frameworks; only about 40% of countries that have adopted NAPs systematically assess their implementation, making it difficult to understand their impact. In Africa, strategies such as climate-smart agriculture (CSA), agroforestry, renewable energy and early warning systems are advancing in implementation, although progress is slow, limited in scope and distributed and heavily dependent on donors. In Zambia, despite strong national policy frameworks and donor support, implementation remains limited due to factors such as weak policy-practice linkages, insufficient institutional coordination and socio-economic challenges. Addressing this global implementation gap is important in governance and systems integration, which requires deliberate vulnerability-informed scaling up of strategies that prioritize transformation and sustainability over short-term solutions that continue to make communities poor.