GEO Matters August 2021

The still unfolding effects of the COVID-19 global health pandemic has presented humankind with new challenges, emphasized fundamental truths and enhanced need for critical review of human interaction with nature. For almost three decades now, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has endeavored to assess, analyze and report on a periodic basis; the states and trends of key global environmental aspects, associated policy effectiveness and outlooks for the future. This is a very important mandate of the organization and it has never been more crucial now. Through its flagship report: Global Environment Outlook (GEO), the world environment has been kept under regular review. In the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-4), member states started a process of assessing how the future of this flagship report would look like. Through establishment of a thirty-seven memberstates- led committee, the steering committee was tasked with considering key aspects of the previous GEOs and the current global environmental assessment’s landscape in the context of UNEP’s science-policy interface to propose options that future GEO’s could take. This task could not be any timely. With a pandemic ravaging global economy, risking more degradation of the environment and hampering progress for the internationally agreed environmental goals and targets, now more than ever, there is urgent need to authoritatively inform policy through regular review of the global environment.