UNEP has important comparative advantages in its scientific-policy authority, normative leadership, and convening power that are widely recognised by stakeholders.
UNEP has a recognised comparative advantage in its scientific-policy authority, normative leadership, and convening power. Over this period, UNEP has played a significant role in shaping global environmental discourse through its science-policy leadership and in helping to establish the concept of the “triple planetary crisis” — climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution — as the dominant framework for understanding interconnected environmental risks.
UNEP’s knowledge products and flagship assessments such as the Emissions Gap Report, continue to be highly valued and inform international climate policy discussions and national planning processes. The organisation’s hosting of multiple Multilateral Environmental Agreement (MEA) secretariats further reinforces its central role within global environmental governance.
UNEP has sharpened its strategic focus, and its Medium-Term Strategies provide coherent and credible strategic frames for addressing the triple planetary crisis. This assessment spans a challenging period. In response to negative environmental trends and increasing demand for its expertise, UNEP has sharpened its strategic positioning around the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution and provides a clear articulation of UNEP’s comparative advantages and long-term direction. The 2022-25 strategy is widely regarded as technically robust, well aligned with the 2030 agenda, and offering clarity of purpose and a shared reference point for Member States and partners. Improvements were also noted in the associated Programme of Work with strengthened results logic and alignment with strategic objectives.
However, UNEP needs to articulate more clearly how it will operationalise its comparative advantages. This gap is particularly urgent in the case of UNEP’s founding mandate as the UN system’s environmental co-ordinator, given the growing dispersion of environmental mandates and activities across the multilateral system. In particular, UNEP’s core normative and co-ordination functions, including its UN system-wide environmental co-ordination and its role in hosting and providing administrative support for MEA secretariats, remain weakly reflected in the Programme of Work’s results framework. The practical consequence is that the functions that most clearly differentiate UNEP from other entities are the hardest to resource, measure, and defend.
Furthermore, there is a fundamental misalignment between what UNEP’s strategy defines as its purpose and what its funding model incentivises it to do. UNEP’s heavy dependence on extrabudgetary, earmarked, projectbased funding, such as from the GEF, has enabled operational scale but also reinforced incentives that prioritise project throughput over upstream normative work, and leaves core institutional functions chronically underresourced. The result is an organisation whose strategy points in one direction and whose funding pulls it in another.
UNEP has undertaken widescale institutional change to close the gap between strategic intent and delivery; but continued efforts are required to ensure intended benefits are achieved.
Reforms initiated during the assessment period are directionally appropriate and reflect genuine institutional ambition to address known weaknesses. To deliver on its strategic ambitions, UNEP has pursued a series of organisational and operational reforms, including important innovations in development areas identified in the previous MOPAN assessment. For example, the Integrated Planning, Management and Reporting system has created, for the first time, a single system connecting planning, monitoring, reporting, and financial tracking across portfolios. The introduction of the Chief Digital Officer and the continued pursuit of the organisation’s digital transformation agenda have produced tools that extend UNEP's convening role digitally. The independent evaluation function has achieved new milestones, such as new project designs required to reference and apply lessons from evaluations, although uptake is uneven. Changes and structural realignment have moved UNEP closer to the logic of the 2022-25 MTS, but the net effect to date is incremental coherence rather than a step-change in organisational performance. Three areas for further attention were identified:
Firstly, the organisation’s decision-making framework limits agility. At an organisational level, the two-year UNEA decision cycle, built around extensive preparatory consultations and negotiated resolutions among member states, combined with CPR’s non-decision-making status hinders the continuous strategic steering and oversight typically expected in the governance of a modern international institution. Furthermore, at an operational level, decision-making authority continues to sit with headquarters, even as responsibility for delivery and results is distributed across divisions, regional offices and support functions. As a result, aspirations for further delegation and adaptive management are not yet matched by operational reality.
Secondly, while the changes introduced have made financial oversight arrangements more rigorous, they have also caused operational frictions. UNEP benefits from a detailed and comprehensive framework of financial regulations, audit standards, anti-fraud mechanisms, and conduct and discipline procedures, backed by a strong audit function. However, the strength of this framework is also its limitation, as the rigour that ensures accountability also creates operational constraints. For example, systemic disbursement delays are consistently traced to internal procedural constraints and administrative arrangements, with a noted reliance on multi-layered approvals. While some of these issues cannot be resolved by UNEP unilaterally and may require joint action with UNON and other partners, attempts to address these organisational frictions have tended to involve additional co-ordination mechanisms and layered controls rather than through simplification of processes and clarity of roles.
Finally, operational performance management systems do not yet fully function as a lever for organisational learning, collaboration, or resource decisions. Corporate commitments to RBM are strong on paper, and the introduction of IPMR marks a significant step forward for tracking costs from activities to results and capturing relevant performance information. Nonetheless, the use of this information, including its integration of monitoring data into strategic planning and operational results, is an area which requires further attention.
Institutional strengthening has contributed to improving project results but continued attention is required to sustainability and efficiency.
UNEP demonstrates improving performance in achieving its development and normative objectives, with a clear positive trajectory in project results. Evidence suggests that UNEP’s development and normative performance has improved significantly during the assessment period. Project evaluations indicate stronger effectiveness, improved financial management, and higher overall project success rates than in previous years. UNEP continues to demonstrate its ability to influence environmental governance, support policy development and implementation of environmental commitments, and strengthen institutional capacities.
Despite these achievements, several concerns remain. Project implementation delays continue to be common, driven both by external risks and UNEP’s internal procedural constraints. Furthermore, evidence of long-term sustainability remains limited. Although sustainability ratings have improved compared with previous assessment periods, only a minority of projects are considered likely to sustain benefits over the longer term. This remains a persistent challenge and limits UNEP’s ability to demonstrate durable impact. UNEP’s evaluation framework relies primarily on end-of-project assessments rather than systematic post-completion follow-up. As a result, the organisation is often unable to verify whether institutional capacities, policy reforms, or governance mechanisms remain effective once project funding has ended. Finally, progress in integrating cross-cutting priorities - particularly gender equality, human rights and attention to vulnerable groups remains gradual and uneven across UNEP’s portfolio.
