Introduction
Welcome to the GEO-6 Regional Assesment for West Asia. This assessment provides an evaluation and analysis of regional issues designed to support environmental decision making. Existing knowledge has been assesed to provide scientifically credible answers to policy-relevant questions, including:
• What is happening to the West Asia environment and why? • What are the consequences for the environment and the human population of West Asia?
• What is being done and how effective is it? • What are the prospects for the environment? • What actions could be taken to achieve a more sustainable future?
The decision to undertake regional assessments was taken at the Global Intergovernmental and Multi-stakeholder Consultation in Berlin, October 21-23, 2014. Participants at the consultation suggested that the sixth edition of the Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) assessment should build on regional assessments which would be conducted in a similar fashion to the global GEO process (UNEP/IGMS.2 Rev.2).
Member States attending the first United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-1) in Nairobi, June 2014, requested:
“the Executive Director, within the programme of work and budget, to undertake the preparation of the sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6), supported by UNEP Live, with the scope, objectives and procedures of GEO-6 to be defined by a transparent global intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder consultation
informed by document UNEP/EA.1/INF/14,
resulting in a scientifically credible, peer-reviewed GEO-6 and its accompanying summary for policy makers, to be endorsed by the United Nations Environment Assembly no later than 2018”
In addition, Member States also requested (UNEP/EA.1/10):
“the Executive Director to consult with all United Nations Environment Programme regions regarding their priorities to be taken up in the global assessment”
Credit: Shutterstock/ Saisnaps 9
Following this request, regional priorities for water, land, marine resources, biodiversity, air, climate change and waste management were established through the Regional Environmental Information Network (REIN) conference for the West Asia region (May 10-14 2015, Amman, Jordan) and used to guide the analysis in this assessment.
The assessment is structured in three main sections:
• Chapter 1 reviews the context and regional priorities established at the REIN conference and explains why each priority is of importance to the region. It considers peace, security and the environment together with the nexus elements for security (water, energy and food) in order to bridge regional priorities and establish common goals.
• Chapter 2 establishes the state of the environment in the region following seven key themes (water resources, land resources, coastal and marine resources, biodiversity, air, climate change, waste management). It provides an overview of regional priorities, analyses the key trends for each environmental issue, followed by possible policy-relevant options. Some of these options require increases in efficiency; others require departures from business-as-usual scenarios.
• Chapter 3 reviews the main trends that will affect the region’s environment in the future and analyses the actions needed to achieve a more sustainable future. It presents possible environmental outlooks for West Asia together with projected emerging environmental issues. The section also considers the role of teleconnections between West Asia and other regions, making the world smaller with respect to the environment. The Chapter presents a scenario (the Oryx scenario) with a vision of environmental and social sustainability and the tenets of sustainable environmental outlooks.
The data underpinning the assessment can be found in UNEP Live (
uneplive.unep.org). The full assessment is also available through UNEP Live as a PDF and as an eBook.
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