By Jan-Gustav Strandenaes
KNAPSTAD, Norway, Sep 22 2025 – “We shall have to do more with less” was the summary message from a meeting in Oslo, Norway, this spring (2025), where the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway, Espen Barth Eide and Guy Ryder, Under-Secretary-General for Policy at the UN and Chair of UN80, both spoke about UN80 and the necessity to reform the UN.

The UN80 initiative is, according to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “a system-wide push to streamline operations, sharpen impact, and reaffirm the UN’s relevance for a rapidly changing world”. “We will come out of this process with a stronger, fit-for-purpose UN, ready for the challenges the future will undoubtedly bring us,”

Ryder has said. The precarious financial situation of the UN family has, however, led many to say that these nice words are euphemisms for a dramatic UN reform, fearing a necessary downscaling of many of its important activities.

This article builds on previous articles on clustering around the Triple Planetary Crisis of pollution (see How Clustering Multilateral Environmental Agreements Can Bring Multiple Benefits to the Environment by Michael Stanley Jones), climate change (see UN 80: Clustering the Climate Change Conventions by Stacey Azores ), and biodiversity loss (see Towards Enhancing Synergies among Biodiversity-Related MEAs: Addressing Fragmentation with Strategic Coordination.

Clustering biodiversity conventions by Hugo-Maria Schally) and most recently, the article on the possibility of clustering the three science bodies (see Better Use of the World’s Expertise in Navigating the Polycrisis by Peter Bridgewater and Rakhyun Kim).

The UN 80 process enables us to look at some of the history of the UN Environment Programme and how to make it more “agile, integrated, and equipped to respond to today’s complex global challenges”. A historic lens is needed, and it would be wise to see if elements of this history can be resurrected and a debate around them can be reenergized to accomplish the goals of the present reform process.

The institutional constraints of UNEP

Where is UNEP in all this? UNEP is a Programme under the UN General Assembly, UNGA, one of the Charter Bodies. As such, any change in UNEP’s structure and status has to be recognised by the UNGA. The UNGA has the power to directly affect UNEP’s work, as well as the outcomes of the UN Environment Assembly, UNEA, even though UNEA is also a body with universal membership.

What was the Global Ministerial Environment Forum?

There is no positive and tangible results without continuity. Since its inception, UNEP has been run by the Governing Council, GC, which consisted of 54 member states elected for a three year period. The GC met in Nairobi every two years, effectively diminishing UNEP’s role as a consistent guardian of environmental issues, at least at the political level.

As environmental problems increased over the years, there was an increasing need for more continuous political decision-making to meet and solve environmental issues, and the Global Ministerial Environment Forum, the GMEF, was established, among others, in order to answer to this challenge.

Conceived as a Special Session, the 6th since the founding of UNEP, the first GMEF took place in the city of Malmoe in Sweden in the year 2000. It was hailed as a success, for several reasons. One notable aspect was that 73 Ministers of Environment attended and engaged in various debates, including exerting political leadership.

Even though 73 member states attended with their environment ministers – the highest ever at the time at an international conference – it is well to remember that the UN then consisted of 189 member states.

A significant outcome document was the Malmoe Declaration, which outlines in no uncertain terms the environmental challenges, that UNEP was the preeminent global organisation on environmental issues and that there is an urgent need for UNEP and all stakeholders to engage and work to safeguard the environment.

UNEP with increasing knowledge in environment, still lacking in authority

Knowledge and understanding of environmental issues grow constantly and makes clear to all its inherent complexity, resulting in new and sometimes divergent environmental themes demanding new political approaches.

On the verge of the 21st Century, and sensing new and dramatically different challenges, the then Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, outlined these challenges in his report to the UN GA in 2000, called “We the peoples: The role of the UN in the 21st Century.” Here, he called for a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to be delivered. New environmental issues were identified, and the multitude of these issues was another reason for establishing the GMEF in 2000. There was a need to try to develop policy coherence.

The third GMEF was held in Cartagena, Colombia, in February 2002, and nearly 100 Ministers of Environment attended. Again, the presence of Ministers proved advantageous to the deliberations and outcome results. This conference also became a an important informal preparatory meeting for the upcoming World Summit for Sustainable Development, WSSD, to be held later that year in Johannesburg.

The delegates at this GMEF emphasised the importance of this forum, and the proposal to organise a GMEF in odd years and not in Nairobi was tabled and agreed to. Annual high-level conferences on the environment were agreed as a necessity. Another interesting proposal tabled was that membership in the GMEF should be universal, an idea that took ten years to materialise. It was not until Rio+20 in 2012 that universal membership at a UN body dealing with environmental policies, the UNEA, was agreed to.

The 11th Governing Council and Global Ministerial Environment Forum was held in Nusa Dua, Indonesia in 2010. A simultaneous extraordinary Conference of the Parties to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, three Multilateral Environmental Agreements, was held back-to-back with the GC/GMEF.

The conference had an overarching objective of enhancing cooperation and coordination and improving synergies in multilateral environmental agreements. As one report states, the meeting broke new ground and set an example of resource-saving coherence among MEAs and perhaps even within the UN system.

Without a seemingly proper analysis of the benefit of annual meetings, the GC/GMEF processes were discontinued with the adoption of the UN Environment Assembly, the UNEA, which held its first session in 2014, and the process was back to high level environment meetings every second year. As the UNEAs were to be held every other year, this decision actually lost the continuity which had been established with the GC/GMEF process.

With the increasing environmental challenges, not the least their complexity, maybe the time has now come to reinstitute annual UN environmental conferences and use the model which was established by the GC/GMEF process – every other year in Nairobi, and the intermittent year in a capital of a member state.

Strengthening UNEP and UNEA by re-establishing the GMEF.

If we re-establish the GMEF and combine it with the UNEAs, we would accomplish a continuity of high-level political and policy-oriented meetings for the environment. The UNEA would, if this were to take place, continue as it is presently organised, but the GMEF would be different. Two UN entities would play centre-stage: The MEAs and the Science-Policy Interfaces

UNEP has been designated by the governing bodies of eight MEAs, to provide secretariat functions to those conventions. This host relationship established with UNEP, means that UNEP is providing administrative and financial support for each secretariat to carry out its responsibilities.

UNEP has for a long time been at the forefront of scientific research on environmental issues. Three Science Policy Interface systems have been established and receive support from UNEP.

The oldest is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC established in 1988. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the IPBES, is less known to the outer world compared to IPCC. It began functioning in 2014 with a secretariat based in Bonn.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution, ISP-CWP, is a new, independent intergovernmental body established to strengthen the global science-policy interface. It began its official existence in June this year (2025).

What could the agenda for the Forum be? It would have to complement and support the upcoming UN Environment Assembly. There would also be other overarching thematic priorities – the Triple Planetary Crises, the current Medium-Term Strategy and the Programme of Work.

The GMEF could be a place where the three established clusters of MEAs, focusing on pollution (chemicals and waste), biodiversity, and climate change, could meet to address synergies, gaps, and potential areas for collaboration.

The MEAs could identify relevant work of a common nature that exists between the conventions and explore interlinkages between them. All this could be informed by the first day of a GMEF when the three science bodies could have identified and presented crucial environmental issues to be solved.

As the meeting would take place midway between the HLPF, the outcome report could also deal with the environmental elements of the SDGs to be dealt with by the next HLPF.

This proposed agenda involves clustering around themes of the Triple Planetary Crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change, ideas, and implementation across science and environmental governance to influence political priorities.

As the GMEF would begin with presentations by the three science bodies outlining urgent issues relating to the Triple Planetary Crises, their presentations could inform the discussions throughout the week but also support any member state in their negotiations at the GMEF as all stakeholders would discuss common problems.

Focus of a systemic nature could be on the inherent inefficiencies in use of financial resources, the MEAs could look at inconsistencies in the international legal systems, they all could discuss functional inefficiencies, but most importantly identify their failures to address interlinkages.

When “forced by a common agenda”, they would all have to focus their priorities on the same themes and thus cluster their input.

An example of an area addressed by the three clusters together could be that of nitrogen, currently under discussion, which exemplifies a cross-cutting theme that could challenge all the UN units mentioned here to explore their approach to addressing it. And if all are assembled in a five-day conference, that could quite possibly happen.

Could such a meeting be financed? The old GMEF was partly financed by the hosting city and country. These cities gave generous grants to the conference, knowing full well that they would earn ten-fold in return as a consequence of participation from 193 member states delegations coming to their city.

The best outcome for UNEP in UN80

UNEP and UNEA lacks proper funding, but perhaps its biggest weakness, which hampers its many efforts to be the preeminent global environment organisation, is UNEP’s lack of authority and political status. This is perhaps the major reason that hampers its efforts to improve its own system.

Substantial improvements in its internal institutional system will always be difficult as long as UNEP is merely a programme under the General Assembly. The GA’s own rules of procedure, its standing in the UN system, and its geographical placement in New York, makes it the key organisational body of the UN, which, by its own position in the UN hierarchy, also makes it a rigid organisation. Whereas UNEP hosts delegations from ministries of the environment, the UNGA delegations are from ministries of foreign affairs.

These ministries address environmental problems in different ways. Whereas foreign offices are among the most important government entities in a country and have, by and large, a generalist understanding and competence on environmental issues, environmental ministries have environmental expertise but are weak in terms of political clout. During the last two decades, environment ministries have also suffered a serious reduction of political influence in several countries, a few have even been closed down.

UN80 can start the process of finishing the work of Klaus Toepfer and Achim Steiner, two former Executive Directors at UNEP, on clustering the biodiversity conventions, and if UNFCCC comes under UNEP, it will provide an opportunity for a cluster on climate change. The creation of a more coordinated and effective science platform will help member states to have the right information and address the environmental issues they raise in a coordinated way.

By focusing on conventions under UNEP management, we gain a more coherent approach, albeit one that does not cover all relevant conventions, but one that will have a greater impact on addressing the Triple Planetary Crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. The proof of concept for the chemicals and waste cluster successfully carried out at the 11th GMEF in 2010 should show us the way.

The re-establishment of the Global Environmental Ministers Forum enables member states at a high level to address the interlinkages, gaps and work programmes of the three established clusters. Wouldn’t it be great to have this ready for 2030 when we will address the future approach to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development? A stronger UNEP has been the vision for many people for a long time. UN80 enables the chance to make that a reality.

Jan-Gustav Strandenaes is a Senior Adviser, Stakeholder Forum. In 2018, he was appointed by the German Government to a peer group assessing its national Sustainability Strategy.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Michelle Brown
NEW YORK, Sep 22 2025 – As world leaders convene in New York, September 22-30, for the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, they will confront a humanitarian sector in crisis. With only 9% of the $47 billion requested for global humanitarian needs currently funded, the sector faces what UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher calls “a crisis of morale and legitimacy” alongside devastating funding cuts. So where do we go from here?

The UN’s Humanitarian Reset, launched this past March, represents the most ambitious attempt in decades to transform how we deliver aid. Rather than viewing this as just another round of reform, we must see it as an opportunity to build something fundamentally better: a system that is locally-led, globally supported, and dramatically more efficient.

The Crisis Driving Change

The scale of today’s humanitarian challenge is daunting. Humanitarian needs continue to increase while funding dwindles, forcing impossible ethical choices about which kinds of programs to prioritize and which communities to serve.

Recent cuts to US foreign aid have accelerated this crisis, leaving organizations scrambling to maintain essential services while thousands of humanitarian workers face layoffs.

Critics have claimed that we are a wasteful, divided bureaucracy. Our response must be to demonstrate that we are efficient, united, independent, and saving lives. If this moment of constraint is forcing our sector to confront uncomfortable truths, it also may unleash us to more fully deliver on our promise.

Reimagining Roles for Maximum Impact

The reset’s core insight is that each actor in the humanitarian ecosystem has unique strengths. Rather than competing for the same roles, we should optimize for what each does best.

• UN agencies excel at diplomacy, coordination, and norm-setting. Their relationships with national authorities and convening power are irreplaceable. But direct implementation often isn’t their strength, and their structures can be prohibitively expensive with high overhead costs and complex security requirements.

• International NGOs bring technical expertise, can access hard-to-reach areas, and maintain principled independence. They can bridge global knowledge with local realities, strengthen national systems, and operate in contexts where civic space is restricted.

• Local and national organizations are the frontline responders with deep community knowledge and long-term presence. They understand cultural dynamics, can negotiate access more effectively, and provide the foundation for sustainable systems.
Communities in access-constrained areas have built schools through diaspora funding, negotiated their own security arrangements, and created supply chains that reach areas many international organizations cannot.

This clarification of roles should drive funding decisions.

If the role of UN agencies is focused on norm and standard-defining, coordination, and pass-through, more resources will be available for international, national, and local actors to drive implementation. The goal isn’t to bypass the UN, but to optimize the entire system. Fund UN agencies for diplomatic engagement and coordination. Fund international NGOs for implementation and technical assistance. Fund local organizations for community engagement and sustainable service delivery.

Cash, Data, and Dignity

Three innovations deserve acceleration regardless of funding levels.

Cash-based programming, particularly multi-purpose transfers, exemplifies the reset’s principles. It’s cost-effective, context-sensitive, and upholds recipient dignity while promoting local ownership. We should shift towards cash-transfer programming where possible.

Similarly, better data sharing and early warning systems can dramatically improve targeting and coordination. Donors should continue to fund a more harmonized data collection and data sharing system for better diagnosis, targeting and coordination of needs, reducing duplication while improving effectiveness.

Critically, as the system streamlines, we cannot lose sight of how central protection must be to all of our work. Most humanitarian crises are protection crises, even if they aren’t acknowledged as such. Gender-based violence services, child protection, and civilian safety aren’t add-ons to humanitarian response—they’re foundations that enable all other interventions to succeed.

The Path Forward

The humanitarian reset isn’t about doing less with less; it’s about doing differently with what we have. It’s about moving from a system driven by the money we can raise to one based on greatest need, even more rooted in and responsive to the communities we serve.

As member states discuss UN80 reforms during this General Assembly session, they must resist the temptation to simply cut programs. Instead, they should invest in the transformation needed to make humanitarian aid more efficient and effective. Member states attending UNGA 80 must champion a humanitarian system that measures success not by institutional survival, but by lives saved and communities empowered.

This means supporting innovative funding mechanisms, investing in local capacity, and having the courage to redistribute power from global headquarters to frontline communities. Fundamentally, radical reform requires those with power to give it away.

The choice facing world leaders in New York is clear: continue with a system that struggles to meet growing needs, or embrace a reset that puts communities at the center and optimizes every actor’s unique contribution.

The humanitarian sector’s breaking point can become its transformation moment, but only if we have the courage to truly reset how we work.

Michelle Brown is Associate Director of Advocacy, Action Against Hunger

IPS UN Bureau

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