A team from the Millennium Institute participated in the First Global Author's Meeting for the seventh edition of the Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) at the United Nations Conference Centre in Bangkok, Thailand from March 13 to 17 2023. The meeting convened experts from around the world who are responsible for drafting the GEO-7 Report to be published in 2026, to define and agree on the report’s structure and content. Environmental degradation is an alarming global issue that affects human health, social justice, and the economy. Despite global policy agendas aimed at slowing this trend, major global environmental assessments such as IPCC and IPBES have highlighted that the degradation of our natural environment is continuing at an accelerating rate. To address this issue, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) developed the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) process, a flagship development report that assesses the state of the global environment to address the impacts of environmental degradation.
GEO-6: Alarming Environmental Degradation Rate
The GEO report is prepared every four years, and the previous GEO-6 report found that current policies and their implementation are inadequate to keep pace with the rate of environmental degradation. The report also revealed that none of the environmental dimensions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be achieved without a transformation in environmental management. As a result, the GEO-7 process aims to explore solution pathways that can enable this transformation.
GEO-7: Exploring Pathways with an Integrated Modeling Approach
To build on the findings from GEO-6 and other major global assessments, the GEO-7 process aims to explore solution pathways that can enable this transformation. To this end, the GEO-7 process will adopt an integrative modeling approach to provide environmental outlooks for 2030 and 2050, including a business-as-usual scenario, with and without policy recommendations, and relative target-seeking scenarios. The potential solution pathways and policy recommendations will further be disaggregated to different country regions and socio-economic contexts.
Our Contribution to the GEO-7
The Millennium Institute’s team is co-authoring the report chapter of the GEO-7 report focused on disaggregating global solution pathways to country-specific contexts. The GEO-7 report is planned to be ready for submission to the United Nations Environmental Assembly in 2025. The Millennium Institute looks forward to contributing to the assessment and providing guidance on policies to accelerate progress in achieving global environmental goals.
Millennium Institute Commitment
The Millennium Institute's participation in the GEO-7 process highlights our commitment to supporting global sustainable development and environmental health. The Millennium Institute's expertise in systems thinking and modeling will be instrumental in developing solutions that are tailored to country-specific contexts, helping to achieve the SDGs and other internationally agreed environmental goals.