GEO MATTERS February 2018

The sixth Global Environment Outlook has been in development since early 2017 and will be published by March
2019. This global assessment focuses more on proposing solutions to our environmental challenges rather than the
environmental impacts themselves. As the co-chairs of the process, we want to ensure that this assessment has the
most significant impact possible and we have made some important suggestions to try to make this happen. These
include:
• The Global Environment Outlook report will be divided equally across the subject areas of
- reporting on the state of the environment,
- assessing our policy response and its effectiveness, and finally,
- examining possible environmental futures and the main pathways to achieving them.
• We intend the report to have a Technical Summary of about 50 pages, which provides the main findings of the
assessment in a concise and easy to use format. This should allow policy analysts and researchers to use these
findings more efficiently in the analysis that they conduct for environmental decision makers.
• We would like the Global Environment Outlook to be published by a scientific press and publisher. We feel
this will increase the reach of the report within the scientific research and education community, allowing the
document to have a more significant impact.