Origins

Greening the Blue was developed by the Sustainable United Nations Facility in conjudction with the UN Environment Programme - where it's housed - with the support of the UN internal coordination body on environmental issues, the Environment Management Group (EMG).

The EMG was established in 2000 in response to a General Assembly resolution (53/242, paragraph 5), with the purpose of:

“enhancing United Nations system-wide inter-agency coordination related to specific issues in the field of environment and human settlements”

More specifically, the role of the EMG is to:

“provide an effective, coordinated and flexible United Nations system response to and to facilitate joint action aimed at finding solutions to important and newly emerging specific issues of environmental and human settlements concern…”

Following meetings in 2006 and 2007 of the UN Secretary-General's Policy Committee, the EMG was requested to take a leading role in greening the UN and making the UN climate-neutral. The Secretary-General announced on 5 June 2007 his commitment to lead by example on these issues.

In response, the EMG Secretariat constituted an open-ended Issue Management Group (IMG) on a Climate Neutral UN  and reconvened the IMG on sustainable procurement, originally established in 2004.

The IMG on a Climate Neutral UN  included representatives from most UN  organizations and met regularly between 2007 and 2009. The IMG established a harmonized, UN-wide approach to measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from all UN  agencies, funds and programmes and shared emissions reduction plans and efforts. The results were published in Moving Towards a Climate Neutral UN in December 2009.

In 2010 the mandate of the IMG was expanded to include wider sustainability issues and procurement, in effect merging - the IMG's on a Climate Neutral UN and on Sustainable Procurement to form a new IMG  on Sustainability Management. The new IMG is supported day-to-day by the Sustainable United Nations facility.

Download the Terms of Reference of the IMG on Sustainability Management
See the full list of IMG Focal Points
Visit the IMG Focal Point pages, including details of all recent meetings.