 I'm Caroline King, I work with the IID drylands team and I've been leading a session on harnessing variability in the drylands. The key challenges for measuring adaptation in the drylands concern the inherent variability in the climate and also in other aspects of the dryland environment so understanding this type of variability and learning to live with it or harness it is key to adaptation but the problem with most of the systems that we have for measuring adaptation and also for measuring development in general don't usually take into consideration the inherent variability in the dryland context so some of these systems don't work very well when they're applied in this context. The most interesting questions or comments that came out of the session were to do with how communities succeed to harness variability in their environment and some of the examples that were mentioned concerned use of scale so using large areas in the drylands to move around to find favorable conditions for rainfall or for pasture also using larger areas of land and larger types of land tenure rather than small pockets of land where conditions sometimes can be subject to variability and where there isn't any room to move around. The area with the least agreement in the session concerned how you measure productivity so successful adaptation normally should be improving the livelihoods of communities in the drylands and often this is expressed in terms of increasing productivity but there was quite a lot of debate about what is productivity, how do we define it and how do we measure it because in the past sometimes productivity has been measured in terms of for example single crops and this doesn't take into consideration the diversity of conditions and the different types of processes that are taking place in the dryland systems. The key lessons learned in this session were that many dryland communities in different parts of the world have succeeded to find ways to adapt to the variable conditions and changing climate that they have found in their environment. They're doing great but sometimes policy makers or donors or scientists have difficulty identifying how they've succeeded and using this understanding to inform the design of better policies and programmes.