By Jyotsna Krishnakumar, Director, Community Wellbeing
The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) is the flagship report of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), and provides an integrated assessment of the state of the
global environment. It presents the environmental trends for air, climate, water, land and
biodiversity, drawing on all the major global assessments from international science panels
and United Nations bodies.
The assessment also looks at the implications for human well-being, and the achievement of the SDGs, as well as provide an outlook that provides the interactions and feedback loops between social, economic and environmental drivers to assess the effectiveness of different policy responses towards achieving more
environmentally sustainable transformative pathways. It ensures continuity with previous
GEOs and allow GEO-7 to provide some updates on the environmental impact of the global
pandemic and recent disasters and conflicts.
Nearly 300 academics and researchers from across the world are contributing to the GEO-7
report, spanning 21 chapters, 6 Chapeaux and the Summary for Policy Makers.
For the first time, the GEO report aims to integrate Indigenous knowledge (IK) as well as local knowledge (LK) into the assessment process. To support this effort, a Task Force (TF) of 17 scholars/researchers and academics who are members of the Indigenous communities and/or those working closely with
Indigenous Communities was established. Their role is to incorporate IK & LK perspectives
into the GEO-7 report and it includes- the 5 standalone IK & LK Chapeaux, contribute as lead
authors in each of the 21 chapters based on their expertise, and the Summary for Policy
makers.
Dr. Jyotsna Krishnakumar, Director, Keystone Foundation was nominated and selected as a
social science lead author. As a member of the IK&LK TF and lead author, she is contributing
to- Chapter 4 -Land and Soils, and Chapter 7- Implication of Planetary Crises on the
Socioeconomic Dimensions of the SDG, both under Section B- State and Trends of the
Environment and the Impacts on Human Systems, to the Section B Chapeaux, the Summary
for Policy makers, the three IK&LK Dialogue reports, and the TF focal point for the IK&LK
Glossary on IK&LK terminologies and concepts.
The GEO-7 process started in 2023, and since then Jyotsna has been actively involved, and
participated in an IK & LK task force strategy meeting in London (October 2023), a global authors’ meeting in Vienna (January 2024) and Nairobi (September 2024). Additionally, she served as a facilitation member for the Indigenous Community and local community virtual dialogue in 2024, and the in-person dialogue in Bangkok (January 2025).
The GEO-7 report is scheduled to be released by December 2025.
