The failure of governments to agree with leading scientists on a major United Nations' report "risks impeding timely action on environmental goals", UCL and other academics say in a new article.
In December, the UN published its latest Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, the result of six years' work, which connects climate change, nature loss and pollution to unsustainable consumption by people living in wealthy and emerging economies.
It warns of a "dire future" for millions unless there's a rapid move away from coal, oil and gas and fossil fuel subsidies.
Previous iterations of the report - 1,100 pages long this year and now in its seventh edition - all came with a summary of the report's findings to make it easier for policymakers and others to digest.
But at a meeting with government representatives to agree the findings in Kenya in October, representatives from some countries said they could not go along with the proposed summary.
As governments could not agree to approve a summary, the report has now been published without the summary and without the support of governments, weakening its impact.
Researchers say that criticism of the report is part of a broader trend in global environmental negotiations - one that also surfaced at the recent COP30 talks.
Now, writing in the journal Nature Sustainability, several of the authors of the report have warned that the failure to agree summaries of the conclusions of major environmental reports like this - which are known as a Summary for Policymakers (SPM) - "risks diminishing the assessment's weight, reducing the political legitimacy needed to inform collective action and impeding timely action on environmental goals".
They are recommending a number of changes to the process by which these summaries are agreed to try to avoid another failure.
Professor Catalina Turcu (UCL Bartlett School of Planning), who was a co-ordinating lead author for one of the report's chapters, said: "The failure to approve the GEO-7 Summary for Policy Makers is not the first collapsed negotiation this year - and should serve as a warning.
"Rising nationalism and geopolitical tensions are making global cooperation more and more difficult, just as environmental crises grow more complex, more interconnected, and more urgent than ever.
"Intra-governmental governance structures that were built for a different era are under strain as times are changing fast. We need to change the process by which we agree these summaries to reflect that."
Professor Gail Taylor (Dean, UCL Life Sciences), also a report-chapter co-ordinating lead author, said: "GEO-7 is an important step forward that is focused on identifying solutions to ensure future generations can live within planetary boundaries - people in harmony with nature, for example as part of a circular economy.
"We very much hope that policymakers examine these solutions and enact them for future generations."
The researchers are proposing three key changes to the process. Firstly, assessment authors should be given the explicit authority to decline edits in summaries that are unsupported in the overall scientific literature, protecting scientific authority of the statements.
Secondly, the different drafts with each edit attributable to an author should be made public, along with mandatory references to the text for each to enhance transparency.
And finally, an independent review of procedures to identify bottlenecks should be commissioned which can recommend improvements and reforms to approval procedures.
The UN GEO-7 assessment was written by 287 scientists from 83 countries over three years for the UN Environment Programme, drawing on extensive peer-reviewed research and expert input.
SPMs are considered an important output of these assessments as they represent a blueprint for policy actions.
Standard for major UN assessments, SPMs are first drafted by the report's scientific authors, then reviewed and negotiated line-by-line by governments to produce a document that all participating countries must agree on to be published.
It's believed to be the first time that a major, multilateral global environmental assessment has been published without an SPM.
Other multilateral assessments, such the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have encountered similar difficulties, but have been able reach consensus and publish a summary for policymakers.
