Although the timing of national policy evaluations may be more flexible, political pressures would make it difficult to commit resources for adaptation evaluations on the basis that results will potentially only be known 20-30 years in the future. At the same time, the value of an evaluation and the lessons it generates may be lost if the evaluation is postponed too far into the future. One option to overcome this challenge is to focus assessments on the achievement of intermediate outcomes, through ongoing monitoring and real-time evaluation.