I firmly believe that the engagement of the business sector in fighting climate change is crucial.
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Source: Sustainable UN
The Sustainable UN facility, together with the UN Environmental Management Group, has in the past two weeks conducted two seminars in Geneva and New York on the topic of how to implement the UN Climate Neutral Strategy. This strategy, adopted by the UN Chief Executive Board in October 2007, commits all UN organisations, funds and programmes to move towards climate neutrality by calculating their carbon footprint, by reducing emissions, and by preparing for a decision on purchasing offsets to compensate for remaining emissions. The seminars in Geneva and New York were attended by about 100 UN staff from 40 different organisations.
It was encouraging to see the level of engagement from participants, which resulted in lively discussions on almost all topics, ranging from how to calculate emissions, to cultural change, to how to budget for offsets, to the role of the procurement system as a barrier or vehicle for emission reduction. Several UN organizations are in fact well underway to establish their Greenhouse gas inventories, in some cases also to reduce emissions, and in a few cases even to go beyond that by preparing to adopt environmental management systems. These are trends that were unheard of only a few years back and now, many UN organizations are gearing up to get first to the goal of demonstrating significant progress towards climate neutrality and sustainability. This is very encouraging, even though most of us still are only at the beginning of our efforts.
An issue of particular interest is how to reduce emission from travel. Travel of staff and meeting participants constitutes one of the largest emission sources for many organisations, sometimes as high as 95%. Opportunities for reducing these emissions as discussed at the seminars include:
Avoid unnecessary missions by providing incentives for staff to think twice before issuing a travel request.
Make it easier to travel in more sustainable ways: make sure that the travel agent can offer train tickets, as well as air tickets.
Fly in economy instead of business class, or lease a more fuel efficient car.
Make sure that the alternatives to travel – typically different forms of electronic communication – are of high standard and easy to use. Today, many UN organizations are discouraging staff from using personalized video links, even though these are far easier and more reliable than traditional video conferencing.
Include information about the “climate cost” on each travel quoted and each ticket issued. Awareness is all!!
Make it fun to use the electronic communication tools – organise meetings in virtual worlds.
Bundle missions together, allow staff to stay on the road in between missions if suitable, use local staff, and put a limit to the number of staff traveling to the same meeting.
Or just use the no-nonsense approach: take an executive decision to reduce the number of missions. This has been done for budget reasons and can also be done for climate reasons.
Clearly there is no lack of good ideas. Our challenge is to implement them. The general perception is that there is in fact very little resistance to this kind of interventions. The barriers consist of business-as-usual inertia – simply a certain unwillingness to test a new ways of doing old things. And what kind of excuse is that?
