The highly anticipated third global authors’ meeting of the Global Environment Outlook was held at the Nansha Grand Hotel in Guangzhou, China from 9-14 October 2017. The meeting was co-organized by UN Environment and the China Southern (Nansha) International Cooperation Southern Centre with the support of the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China. The meeting covered a full six days, with opening ceremonies and planning meetings on the first day and an outreach event and field trips on the last day. The global assessment authors for the sixth Global Environment Outlook met to address the review comments from the second-order draft review of the first nine chapters of the global assessment. They also had the opportunity to obtain guidance from the Review Editors on how to deal with the review comments and to advance the Policy Effectiveness chapters and Outlooks chapters towards their first-order draft quality. Outlooks authors were also involved in a stakeholder workshop that seeked to gather more information on the Innovative Outlooks component of the assessment. The global assessment authors also participated in an expert elicitation exercise to assess the effectiveness of a select group of policy case studies. Lastly, the authors discussed how to advance the drafting of the ‘common thread’ of the economic or equity dimensions throughout the sixth Global Environment Outlook.