Climate Action - Assisting business towards carbon neutrality

It is my pleasure to share in this space the adventures of the Sustainable United Nations (SUN) initiative over the coming months. SUN was established in early 2008 as a project to support all UN organisations to become climate neutral.The UN is an organisation with some 70,000 employees of 198 nationalities in 37 major agencies, funds and programs, based in about 530 locations in 170 countries. Each UN organisation (UNEP, UNESCO, WHO, ILO, UNDP etc) is committed through a decision by the UN’s Chief Executive Board to do three things:

   1. Prepare a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory
   2. Reduce emissions as much as possible
   3. Prepare to purchase GHG offsets for remaining emissions.

The deadline for achieving these three goals is December 2009, a short enough period to make this interesting.

SUN is composed of a small team of seven core staff based in the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the division office for Technology, Industry and Economics, in Paris, France. We have a core budget to cover our own activities (development of tools, travel etc) but investments in GHG emission reduction will have to be done by each organisation itself.

So how do you go about this task? Well a few basic principles were obvious from the start:

   1. Learn from what others have done. We are not the first to attempt this. Good and bad experiences exist elsewhere and we try to listen and learn as much as possible to what others have learned.
   2. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Much information and inspiration is already out there and just requires a bit of adaptation to be useful to the UN. In other areas we definitively will have to develop new approaches and tools.
   3. We (SUN) are small and they (the UN) are big, so let’s find allies to work together with. In the UN there are in fact a large number of “green initiatives” – more or less management sanctioned efforts to improve the sustainability of the organisation. The enthusiasm and ideas brought by such initiatives are very valuable.
   4. There is a moment in time NOW when there is serious attention given to climate change mitigation. If we are to get our “clients” started it has to be while the top level attention is there. Certainly we don’t mind individual UN organisations moving ahead on their own, but one of the key ideas with SUN is to pool resources and experiences among UN organisations to deal with climate change. It will be easier to do this if we have all UN organisations on-board as early as possible.

The next step for SUN is really to get our services and tools up and running. We anticipate that SUN will both function as an advisory service to organisations wishing to become green, and as a repository of tools and resources, such as facility management guidelines, life cycle budgeting tools, technology source books, training modules etc. A key concern is where to draw the boundary for our work. Initially we have said that we will include all GHG emissions related to UN activities directly under the UN’s management control, such as buildings operations and travel and transport, but to exclude the personal sphere of staff or field projects where the UN is not the implementing partner. However, each client may wish to define their borders themselves and we already have some clients where the boundary is drawn along a physical location, and other clients where the boundary include the organisation, including offices in several countries. WE still have to learn how this will work out in reality.

So how is it going? So far the interest from UN organisations (and other organisations too) has been overwhelming. It is clear that the idea about SUN providing technical advice and support is much needed and very welcome. After four months we have already started work with 15 organisations, assisting them in initial screening of opportunities for GHG emission reduction. To this end we have developed a screening questionnaire that collects basic information in a range of areas of relevance to the GHG performance of the organisation: policy and management practices, buildings and facility management, procurement, in-house culture, staff incentives etc. We have also learnt that it is important to get into the organisations at a high enough level: for example, if you start working with facility managers you will have excellent data and feed-back on facility related issues but it will be almost impossible to work on procurement, management systems etc.

So far we can definitively say that we have a bit of a learning curve ahead and we will be happy to share our experiences from this in coming issues.