Greening the Blue Tutorial

The Greening the Blue Tutorial is designed for UN personnel to provide training on environmental sustainability at the UN system. The Tutorial highlights the work that's underway across the UN system to improve its environmental performance and provides helpful advice on how each person can contribute to that effort, by calculating and reducing their own work-related footprint.

The Tutorial takes the form of an animation in which we follow two UN personnel – Stick and Bean – as they discover their work-related environmental impact and ways to reduce it throughout a typical UN workday.

 

Access

The Greening the Blue Tutorial is free for use across the UN system and externally. It is available in English, French, and Spanish.

Promotion Materials 

You can make a difference! Poster

Tutorial Movie Poster

Background

To meet the United Nations’ environmental commitments, the engagement of every UN personnel member is key to success. With the proliferation of entity-specific environmental management systems and the need to communicate about organizational efforts in Greening the Blue, several UN entities expressed the need to equip personnel with a thorough grasp of what environmental sustainability means, why it is important and the role each person can play in reducing the UN’s carbon footprint. 

Greening the Blue Tutorial was launched in 2014 by the United Nations Environment Programme, United Nations Development Programme and the Issue Management Group on Environmental Sustainability Management to respond to these needs. 

The Tutorial was updated during 2020 and 2021 to reflect the most recent global and UN system changes, to make the main characters gender-neutral and to align with the requirements for training for UN Staff identified in the Strategy for Sustainability Management in the United Nations System 2020 - 2030, Phase I.

About

The Tutorial is delivered as a one-hour animation, in which we follow two animated characters - Stick and Bean - on a typical workday, segmented into 10 modules. Each module represents a different activity. Activities include booking travel, taking a lunch break, travelling on ground transport, and arranging meetings. 

The Tutorial is presented in a fun and light tone, with multiple opportunities for user interaction. It allows the user to explore the different decisions related to the environment that UN personnel face day-to-day and to understand how these can impact the environmental footprint of the organization.

By being open for use by all, the Tutorial also helps demonstrate the UN’s commitment to its environmental sustainability mission and provides advice to anyone outside the UN system wanting to learn how to reduce their workplace carbon emissions.