in the context of climate change adaptation and mitigation it has been argued that the use of a baseline as a comparator may be misleading since adaptation interventions will by definition take place in a changing environment with evolving climaterelated hazards and risks brooks et al a more accurate assessment would therefore need to factor in these changing circumstances to establish a good understanding of what the situation would have been in the absence of a policy approach on adaptation brooks et al for example a simple before and after comparison may show that climate vulnerability has deteriorated while a comparison to a counterfactual would reveal that the situation would have been even worse without the explicit and implicit adaptation initiatives in place