With over three decades of experience, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a leading multilateral environmental fund that supports developing countries in prioritizing and implementing environmental actions that deliver global environmental benefits. The GEF’s mandate covers a broad range of environmental areas primarily tied to the 1992 Rio conventions and other multilateral environmental agreements: specifically, biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, and chemicals and waste. According to the June 2025 GEF Corporate Scorecard, since its inception in 1992, the GEF has provided more than $23.0 billion in grants and mobilized an additional $149.0 billion in cofinancing for more than 5,000 projects in 170 countries (GEF Secretariat 2025).
The GEF Trust Fund is replenished every four years; these replenishments are informed by a comprehensive independent assessment of GEF results and performance. There have been seven such overall performance studies of the GEF so far. This Eighth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF (OPS8), performed by the GEF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), aims to provide solid evaluative evidence drawn from 34 separate evaluations conducted since OPS7 to inform the negotiations for the ninth replenishment of the GEF (box 1.1).
Specifically, as established in the approach paper approved by the GEF Council in June 2021, the objective of OPS8 is to evaluate the progress made by the GEF since OPS7, the extent to which the GEF is achieving the objectives set out in the GEF-8 Programming Directions (GEF Secretariat 2022a), and to identify potential improvements going into GEF-9.
The audience for OPS8 comprises the GEF donors, the GEF Council, the GEF Assembly, and the GEF partners—including the GEF Secretariat, the GEF Agencies, the GEF Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP), the convention secretariats and their conferences of the parties, the GEF–Civil Society Organization (CSO) Network—and project proponents from civil society, the public and private sectors, and the academic community.
This chapter of the OPS8 report sets the stage for understanding the evaluation by outlining its purpose, scope, approach, and methodology. It also provides essential background on the GEF as an institution, including progress made since OPS7. The chapter opens with a snapshot of the global environmental challenges and constraints the GEF must navigate—ranging from the unprecedented loss of ecosystems and biodiversity to climate change; chemical pollution; increasing pressure on forests, oceans, and wildlife; as well as persistent poverty, unemployment, social exclusion, and widening inequality.
