Call for proposals: Baseline assessment for Sustainable Actions for Ecosystems Restoration in Pakistan (SAFER Pakistan)

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), in partnership with UNICEF Pakistan and UN Women Pakistan, is implementing the Adaptation Fund–supported project “Sustainable Actions for Ecosystems Restoration in Pakistan (SAFER Pakistan)”.

Pakistan is one of the world’s most climate-impacted countries, ranked first in German Watch’s Long-Term Climate Risk Index 2025. The South Asian country grapples with recurrent climate-induced crises, including heatwaves, droughts, floods, and food shortages. The pressing imperative for Pakistan lies in enhancing adaptive capacity, resilience, and reducing vulnerability to these shocks. The Indus River is central to this challenge, playing a pivotal role in South Asian economies. Additionally, women and children are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As climate change brings a greater frequency and intensity of drought, floods, heatwaves, air pollution and disease, it is critical to prioritise positioning women and children at the centre of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

To address this, the SAFER Pakistan project aims to reduce the vulnerability and increase the adaptive capacity of communities across the Indus Basin through the following six thematic components:

1. Cryosphere risk reduction
2. Springshed revival and management
3. Groundwater management and resilient community water services
4. Ecosystem-based adaptation (wastewater treatment)
5. Surface water conservation
6. Adaptive capacities and empowered communities for climate resilience

Each component is subdivided into two/three distinct output categories:

1. Knowledge gap filling, or ground-truthing ensures contextual appropriateness of the individual adaptive measure and includes communities in deploying the solutions and ensuring their sustainability.
2. Community-level interventions that increase community member’s adaptive capacity, with a focus on gender and youth inclusion.
3. Institutional changes or advocacy thereof, co-developed with local authorities to support the scaling up of the successful adaptive strategies and practices at the local and provincial level.

A robust Baseline Assessment is essential to establish the status of project indicators, inform implementation planning, and provide a benchmark for monitoring progress, and evaluation. This assessment at the beginning of the project will establish a reference point for future comparisons. It will involve systematically collecting and analysing data related to key indicators, performance metrics, and contextual factors relevant to the project’s outcomes. This will provide a benchmark against which progress towards outcomes and outputs of the project’s interventions can be measured over time, enabling effective monitoring and evaluation throughout the project cycle.

2. Purpose of the Baseline Assessment

The overall purpose of this consultancy will be to:

• Co-design with the ICIMOD SAFER Project Management Team and SAFER partners to carry out a comprehensive Baseline Assessmentcovering all six project components (listed under section 1 of this ToR) and target areas in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and Sindh provinces in Pakistan to understand current conditions, identify existing challenges, and measure the status quo (conflict-risks) before any interventions or initiatives are implemented.

This will entail the following from the consultancy firm:

• A thorough review of the Results Framework to determine priorities for baseline data collection.
• Elaborate on key definitions (impact, outcome and outputs) in SAFER Results Framework that frame the next steps for baseline assessment surveys (e.g. community, households, community members etc).
• Develop baseline data collection tools, sampling plans, stakeholder consultation guides, data-entry templates and analysis protocols.

• Lead the process of data collection (quantitative and qualitative), ensuring gender-, age- and vulnerability-disaggregated information.
• Identify and assess if there are any other pre-existing interventions and sites by government, ICIMOD, UNICEF, UN Women and other actors which are similar to this project, to allow for the avoidance of duplicate efforts or the ability to leverage these initiatives, as appropriate.
• Analyse data to establish baseline values for each indicator in the project’s results framework.
• Present the findings at an Inception Workshop in Pakistan, early September 2025.
• Produce clear, actionable and data driven recommendations for refining project outcomes/outputs/targets and activities, ensuring equity-focused interventions, as appropriate.

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