This CDI Practice Paper addresses the role of tools in supporting interventions to achieve the ‘triple wins’ of adaptation, mitigation and development. Over recent years there has been a proliferation of guidance tools to support adaptation or mitigation, increasingly in a development context, but little work on the role tools play in helping to bridge the gap between these three areas in practice. Based on a review of tools in view of ‘climate compatible development’, the paper suggests key considerations for how tools could help achieve ‘triple wins’. They include:

1. the importance of understanding how tools are a way of defining and shaping a goal, not merely helping to implement actions to achieve it;
2. the value of acknowledging different starting points, and that a lot of the integration is happening – and will continue to happen – on the side of users; and
3. because tools cannot provide all the answers to complex problems they need to be complemented by analysis of actors, goals and outcomes.