Global Environment Outlook (GEO)

Keeping the global environment under review

The Global Environment Outlook, GEO for short, is the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) flagship assessment to provide comprehensive, science-based, policy-relevant information on the current state and future prospects of the global environment and its interactions with human well-being. Increasingly, the GEO approach also serves as a basis for preparing integrated environmental assessments and outlooks at the sub-global—regional, national, ecosystem or local— levels around the world.

GEO assessments seek to answer the following questions:

To date, UNEP has published four comprehensive GEO reports: GEO-1, GEO-2000, GEO-3 and GEO-4 and many regionally or thematically focused outlook reports following the same assessment and reporting methodology.

IISD has been a member of UNEP's Collaborating Centre network on GEO since GEO-1. Besides contributing to the global GEO process and reports, we also contributed to the development of the GEO Data Portal and GEO Yearbooks, and serve as a leading external partner of UNEP on capacity building for integrated environmental assessment and reporting.

IISD participated in GEO-4 through Dale Rothman serving as Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 9 on The Future Today – Towards 2015 and Beyond and Jane Barr, M&A associate working directly for UNEP as Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 6 on Regional Perspectives and as a Consultant to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) as Lead Author of Chapter 6's North American section.

For more information on our role in the GEO process overall and capacity building specifically, please contact IISD's Director of Measurement and Assessment, László Pintér. For more information on the scenario chapter in GEO-4 please contact Dale Rothman and for information on GEO-4's chapter on regional perspectives please contact Jane Barr.