Environmental assessments have a long history of helping to document our knowledge of the state of the Earth system and its evolution, and to provide consensus information in a way that is broadly useful to stakeholders, including policy-makers, who are looking to understand the relationship between the environment and the human activities that either influence it or are influenced by it. For several decades, international assessments such as the climate assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the ozone assessments of the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme have helped to advance the science and inform policy development. More recently, individual nations and sub-national elements (states, provinces, regions, etc.) have been engaged in the development of assessments that look at smaller geographical scales (e.g., regional or local) than the global ones, but which may then provide more detailed and specific information for scientists and policy-makers in those regions. In this session, presentations that summarize the results, processes used in the development and implementation of these smaller scale assessments (e.g., the US National Climate Assessments carried out by the US Global Change Research Program) are sought, with a strong interest in sharing experiences and lessons learned from the experiences of those involved.