Global Environment Outlook

Credible environmental information is essential for strategic policy making for sustainable development. The wide range of global, regional and national assessments being produced by UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) programme are progressively filling this need the world over. The GEO report series was initiated in response to a UNEP Governing Council decision in 1995 requesting a new type of report.

The main aim of GEO is to support environmental management and policy setting through integrated assessment of the state of the environment, analyzing environmental trends, their driving forces, current policies and emerging issues. Three comprehensive GEO reports have been published to date (in 1997, 1999 and 2002), based on information supplied by a global network of collaborating centres and numerous individual experts and specialized institutions with a broad range of disciplinary and geographical expertise.

In February 2003, UNEP’s Governing Council decided to extend the interval between comprehensive GEO reports to five years, a more realistic time frame for tracking environmental change and identifying significant trends and emerging issues. GEO-4 will be published in 2007.

Global Environment Outlook Website