The Fourth and final Global Authors Meeting of the Sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) 

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) is a consultative process, participatory process that builds capacity for conducting integrated environmental assessments and reporting on the state, trends and outlooks of the environment. GEO is also a series of products that informs environmental decision-making and aims to facilitate the interaction between science and policy.

The fourth author’s global meeting is the final global author’s meeting and is co-organised by UN Environment and the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources of Singapore. The major theme of the meeting is cities and urbanization. 

As in previous meetings, five main groups will participate in the meeting, including:

• Authors and experts who are writing the report;
• The High-level Intergovernmental and Stakeholder Advisory Group, which is responsible for ensuring the policy relevance of the Global Environment Outlook;
• The Scientific Advisory Panel, which will work to ensure the scientific credibility of the Global Environment Outlook process;
• And the authors drafting team for the Summary for Policy Makers;
• The Global Environment Outlook Fellows, who are assisting the authors on research questions and other areas of developing the chapters.

With so many groups participating, the meeting has several key objectives:

• Begin drafting of the Summary for Policy Makers;
• Address all comments received from the first order draft review for the first Policy and Outlooks chapters;
• Move the Policy Effectiveness chapters towards second order draft quality, by:
  • Improving coherence of chapter text
  • Reducing overlap and duplication in the coverage of issues
  • Ensuring adequate coverage of each thematic and cross-cutting issues
  • Move the Outlooks chapters towards second order draft quality by:
  • completing the scenario/outlook review chapter
  • advancing the methodology and conclusions chapters
  • finishing the ‘seeds' chapter
• Gather more data for the Outlooks component of the report with another stakeholder visioning workshop;
• Advance the drafting of the cross-cutting issues and ‘common threads’ throughout Global Environment Outlook.

The Fourth Global Authors meeting will combine several activities which will encourage broad collaboration among the participants, information sharing and networking.  Although authors will focus mainly on improving their draft chapters, the opportunity for collaboration is expected to allow a more holistic view to be presented in the report, in line with the focus on providing guidance on how to best achieve Sustainable Development Goals.