Climate Action - Assisting business towards carbon neutrality

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UNEP’s Sustainable United Nations (SUN) initiative aims at providing practical support to organisations to reduce GHG emissions.  We are now starting to gain some practical experience from working with various organisations inside and outside UN, and today I wanted to share some recent practical experiences:

An organisation is just like a second hand car. You can’t trust the owner’s manual. The original design has changed, bits and pieces have been replaced, the owner does not really know what is under the hood, and the fuel consumption far exceeds the theoretical values. For this reason: Always check the facts! In SUN we ask organisations to provide initial information about policy and management systems, procurement and operations systems, about staff satisfaction, buildings design and maintenance, travel policies and much more. While this screening is always useful we always find major discrepancies or even contradictions between information provided and conditions observed during site visits. At a recent SUN visit to one UN organisation a senior manager, after a fact finding meeting between SUN and his staff, expressed that he was completely surprised to learn the difference between theory and reality in his own organisation.

Identifying the problem is not the same as identifying the solution: In many organisations the energy use for heating or cooling of buildings is a major greenhouse gas source. The implicit conclusion is that the heating/cooling system is inefficient and needs to be upgraded (which is often quite expensive). But consider first these alternative or complementary options:

• Adjust the indoor temperature. It is exceedingly common that offices are over cooled or over heated, because of poor temperature control locally or centrally. This can often be fixed by staff information and installation or adjustment of temperature sensors and thermostats.

• Ensure that heating and cooling devices cannot run simultaneously in the same area (this is often seen, with some windows opened for extra effect).

• Reduce cooling/heating when the building is not in use, during nights, weekends, and holidays. As a complementary strategy, pre-cool, or pre-heat the building during off-peak hours to reduce the demand for heating cooling during peak hours.

• Provide external shading devices to reduce the cooling load. This can be extremely cost effective in tropical conditions.

• Improve the insulation of windows, walls, roofs (hot and cold climates)

• Ensure that the maintenance of the heating/cooling system is regularly performed and verified in accordance with best practices or manuals if available.

• Conduct a heating/cooling system retro-commissioning. Rather than replacing the existing system, a complete performance test and verification can often identify opportunities for improving the efficiency of (old and new) systems significantly.

There is always an administrative reason why things can’t be done. So change the administrative rules! There are today some fantastic and innovative ways of organising work in manners that were not possible only a few years ago. For example, e-commuting and working from outside the office (at the hotel, at the airport, at the café, at home) is now completely reasonable and makes perfect sense from an environmental, as well as economic perspective (if 50% of the staff do not use their offices 50% of the time, the organisation can cut real estate cost by 25% and still get the work done with more staff less frustrated by commuting). Particularly in the UN, the administrative rules will generate a number of reasons why this can’t be done: insurance policies, data safety, personal security, management access to staff etc. The fact is that these rules were created in different times and should be changed. But it is not likely that the people making a living from implementing the rules will take the lead in changing them, so it is up to the climate neutral focal point to drive this issue. Don’t give up!

Videoconferencing is not all it promises to be. There must be an enormous potential for high quality video conferencing services. For many organisations, in particular UN, travel of staff and meeting participants constitute a major (or the major) source for greenhouse gas emissions. The first measure proposed for reducing the number of air miles travelled is “to make better use of video conferencing”. But in SUN we still have to find an organisation that is making more than sporadic use of their video conferencing equipment. The reasons are well known for anyone who ever participated in a video conference: Difficult to set up links, expensive to use, poor picture and audio quality, very limited possibility to share presentations and documents etc. Even organisations in UN that have the mission to promote the use of IT technology, or to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases find it difficult to make good use of this technology. But alternatives exist: Virtual Presence is a high quality video conferencing system, which offers close to real life meeting quality but the investment costs are prohibitive for most organisations. Skype is another low-cost individual communication and conferencing platform that can be run at your PC. But so far few organisations have pursued this as a common alternative to videoconferencing or travel. The reality is that there still is a big job to be done on more efficient travel and better alternatives to travel.