United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

EXECUTIVE-DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE

“The UNEP must lead by example. We must ‘walk the talk’ by managing our own impact, promoting a culture of sustainability, and above all, working with our leaders, staff and partners to help and support them to be more sustainable too.  I am committed to accelerating sustainability efforts to promote efficient energy use, zero waste to landfill, low-emission transportation, carbon neutral buildings and sustainable supply chains and procurement. Having detailed data from Greening the Blue and making sure the entire organisation has that at its fingertips, is crucial”.

Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Inger Andersen

MISSION

UNEP’s mission is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.

FIELD OFFICES

ALIGNMENT WITH THE STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT IN THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM, 2020 - 2030

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warmly welcomed the Secretary General’s ‘Moving Towards Climate Neutrality UN’ (2007) initiative and took the lead in becoming climate neutral as of 1 January 2008.

Since UNEP Executive Director’s commitment in October 2007, several actions have been undertaken to improve and monitor UNEP’s environmental performance. In response to the EMG call for devising and implementing an EMS at agency level, and in line with what was foreseen in UNEP’s Climate Neutral strategy, UNEP decided to start developing its own EMS in 2015.

Over the years, the UNEP Environment Management System (EMS) has undergone modifications to fall in a wider evolving context, at the UN system and UN Secretariat levels. In May 2019, the UN System 2020-2030 Sustainability Management Strategy was endorsed by the Chief Executive Board (CEB) aiming at having by 2025, all UN entities implementing an Environment Management System (EMS) at entity level including an environmental policy, and targets.

Moreover, the UN Secretariat has been requested by Member States to integrate sustainable development practices into Secretariat-wide operations. To deliver on this, the UN Secretary-General approved on September 2019 the Environmental Policy for the United Nations Secretariat (ST/SGB/2019/7) and the UN Secretariat Climate Action Plan (UNSCAP) 2020-2030. UNEP being a specialized agency within the UN Secretariat, is guided by the latter. Given that the secretariat of UNEP falls under the UN Secretariat, UNEP decided to adapt the UN Secretariat Environmental Policy (ST/SGB/2019/7). In January 2020, with a decision of UNEP’s Senior Management Team, UNEP undertook to renew its Environmental Management Systems (EMS) to further align it with the UN System 2020-2030 Sustainability Strategy goals. This work started with the adoption of the UN Secretariat Environmental Policy and defining the main objectives and work areas for the EMS for the EMS second cycle (2020-2024).

EMISSIONS REDUCTION

UNEP has been monitoring and reporting its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 2008 and became carbon neutral since then. Later in 2010, the first baseline was established. 

Since 2010, UNEP has reported on every emission producing activity under its financial and/ or managerial control, which include: Air Travel (staff and participants paid for by UNEP); and Office Emissions (official vehicle use, electricity use, refrigerants use for air conditioning, district heating/ purchased steam and fuel use in generators and boilers). The latest available data on the GHG emissions inventory exercise is from 2022, which was issued in mid-2023. The UNEP inventory data for 2023 will be ready in mid-2024.

Based on the Strategy for sustainability management in the UN system, 2020 - 2030, GHG emissions should decrease 45% from 2010 levels by 2030

• First UNEP EMS Cycle (2015-2019): The overall GHG emissions (from premises and air travel) in 2019 (end of our first UNEP EMS Cycle) reached a total mitigation level of 16% or an average decrease of 1.9% a year since 2010 (our initial baseline year). Since 2010, several concrete actions have been undertaken to reduce UNEP GHG emissions. However, the increase in number of participants to major events as well as the growth of our headcount led to an annual rise in emissions between 2016 and 2019. 
• Second UNEP EMS Cycle (2020-2024): In 2022, air travel emissions account for the biggest share of the total UNEP carbon footprint, and therefore it is an environmental priority to tackle under the second EMS cycle. Despite the increase in emissions throughout the 1° EMS Cycle till 2019 (Pre-COVID period), we have already made the behavioural change of not traveling during COVID period (showing a 85% decrease over the 2020 and 2021 years). Therefore, it is time to build upon this momentum and avoid old travel patterns by resetting our baseline to 2019 and define new targets for the next years that will help us in achieving a 50% reduction by 2030 as per the UN-Wide Climate Action Plan.
• While there was a large reduction in flights during the pandemic, we now need to adapt our meeting and travel practices to the post-pandemic new normal to avoid old travel patterns. Virtual meetings and events are now part of the environmental aspects chosen for the second cycle of UNEP EMS (2020-2024). Over the years, UNEP has also been including the GHG emissions of the UN Environment Assemblies in its annual reporting and has ensured its climate neutrality during such events. 

Another target set by the UN Secretariat Climate Action Plan (UNSCAP) 2020-2030 is to reach a renewable energy share of 40% in 2025 and 80% in 2030. Based on the UNEP data in all offices the share of renewable energy sums up to 13% of the total electricity consumed.

• Energy use is a fundamental aspect of facilities management and operation. However, if not originating from renewable sources, energy generation consumes natural resources like fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels produces GHG emissions and contribute to bad air quality and climate change. In this context of sustainable energy management, it is important for UNEP to track the energy consumption, reduce it, increase efficiency, and move to sustainable and renewable energy sources.
• In addition, air conditioning requires refrigerants use. These can slowly leak to the atmosphere over time, especially if the equipment is not properly maintained. Good maintenance, cleaning of the condensers and filters, control of the condenser pressure and switching to non-ozone depleting substances and refrigerants with lower Global Warming Potential (GWP) is important. However, depending on the location, building insulation and natural ventilation could replace or decrease their need. UNEP offices are powered by the host country or city’s electricity grid and on-site stationary combustion. Few have on-site renewables (e.g., UNEP Headquarters) or are fed by a renewable energy grid (e.g., Regional office for Europe - ROE).

EMS AND REDUCTION EFFORTS

UNEP is the UN System’s designated entity for addressing environmental issues at the global and regional level and is a major actor and leader in the UN System’s internal sustainability work. In light of its mandate and the continuous endeavour to practice what it preaches, in 2015 UNEP put in place an Environmental Management Systems (EMS) for its facilities and operations to systematically strengthen its efforts towards environmental sustainability. The second cycle of the EMS covers 4 years from 2020 to 2024.

The scope of the EMS defines the functional, geographical, and organizational boundaries covered by the EMS. To determine the scope, UNEP looks at activities and operations that it can control and those it can influence. UNEP is planning to extend the EMS boundary during the second EMS cycle to cover not only Headquarters (HQ) but also different offices away from HQ.

In 2020, UNEP conducted an Initial Environmental Review (IER), which analysed UNEP’s current environmental performance and evaluated the gaps, corrective actions and decisions that will be taken for the second EMS cycle (2020-2024).

Based on the analysis from this review, UNEP is in the process of updating its EMS approach towards integrating environmental risks into our enterprise risk management process. This new approach will allow us to focus on what really matters. That is the identification of significant aspects and impacts that needs to be managed through the EMS Action Plans for the period of 2020-2024. The planned actions will fall in the different categories aiming at decreasing the environmental impacts of UNEP’s facilities and operations to enable UNEP to meet its set emissions targets. Depending on the aspect, the scope is either on an organizational level or office dependent.

Air travel represents most of the total UNEP GHG emissions. Considering it is an area where UNEP has full control over, emissions reduction efforts are focused on this aspect.

UNEP’s offices are generally leased or rented thus UNEP does not have full control over the management of the office. However, UNEP is working with and supporting the landlord and facilities managers of the various offices to environmentally improve the different facilities management aspects of the offices related to energy use, waste management and water management.

Financial resources are needed to support the implementation of the action plans along with dedicated human resources. UNEP has put in place a carbon levy mechanism and a Climate Neutral Fund to provide the resources to buy offsets to maintain UNEP’s climate neutrality and finance green/sustainable initiatives within the EMS scope.

Monitoring our environmental performance is key for continuous improvement of our system. UNEP has been collecting and reporting since 2008 on the GHG emissions of its facilities and operations via the Environmental inventory and the Greening the Blue Report (www.greeningtheblue.org/). The environmental inventory is an annual exercise that involves data collection and analysis from purchased electricity to water use and waste generation and processing. UNEP is planning to implement an online tool to generate more trackable environmental data, improve report frequency, and better manage our environmental performance, in particular related to Air Travel GHG emissions.

Meeting participants represent around half of the total air travel emissions of UNEP. Replacing in-person meetings by remote meetings was forced by the 2020 global circumstances but the practice should be maintained. To maximize UNEP’s potential in remote meetings and events, UNEP is working on improving the culture and practices around this aspect in the organization as enabler to reduce the need for air travel and subsequent GHG emissions. Building upon this momentum, UNEP Corporate Services Division (CSD) has also updated the UNEP air travel guidelines to urge for considerations in the planning process before travelling to reduce our footprint.

Events are also an important part of UNEP’s mandate delivery. Remote meetings/ events can only to some extent replace the in-person meetings/events. Thus, ensuring that UNEP’s large events are sustainable in all aspects and climate neutral is important.

Personnel awareness and behaviour of staff are the basis for support in an EMS process. In that sense, environmental sustainability awareness training has been made mandatory for all UNEP personnel.

Personnel will be aware and participate in the EMS implementation, so that environmentally sustainable behaviours and decisions are mainstreamed in every-day life to reduce our environmental impact.

Each year, as part of the Greening the Blue Report on Environmental Governance, each participating UN entity’s progress on the development of an Environmental Management System (EMS) is evaluated according to the UN system’s EMS criteria (these criteria are available on the Methodology webpage). Upon this evaluation the entity is then rated Exceeds, Meets, Approaches, or No response. For the 2022 reporting year, UNEP’s progress on the EMS is rated as: Approaches.

ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL SAFEGUARDS AND STANDARDS IN POLICIES, PROJECTS AND PROGRAMMES

UNEP has recently updated its travel guidelines to take into consideration emission during planning of travel to reduce UNEP´s carbon footprint. Lessons learnt from the last two years demonstrate that we can reduce our carbon air travel footprint while continuing to deliver on our mandate. To avoid coming back to pre-pandemic travel patterns, UNEP urges all personnel to engage with their teams and before deciding to travel to make sure:

• Feasibility of holding virtual meetings in lieu of in-person travel
• If travel is deemed necessary, to plan and take routes which minimize footprint
• Bundle missions to avoid traveling back and forth
• Reduce the number of travelers on one mission or to one meeting
• Choose lower carbon means of travel
• Travel Plan template includes carbon levy calculation

For the 2022 reporting year, UNEP’s status of implementing environmental and social safeguards and standards in their policies, projects and programmes is: Yes.

ENVIRONMENTAL TRAINING FOR PERSONNEL

Staff involvement is a key factor and a performance indicator to assess the success of our environmental management ambitions. Our challenge is how everyone can contribute to that effort.

In this context, UNEP has made the Greening the Blue Tutorial (developed by the SUN facility and UNDP) as a mandatory training for all UNEP personnel to enlighten on what environmental sustainability means, why it’s important, and the role each person can play in reducing the UNEP environmental footprint.

In addition, a Training Program on Environmental Management System and a series of workshops have been developed for EMS Focal points to provide hands on experience on the development of risk registers and mitigation action plans to reduce our environmental footprint at each location across UNEP.

For the 2022 reporting year, UNEP’s status on providing training on environmental sustainability is: Yes, it is mandatory for all personnel.

ENVIRONMENTAL INVENTORY APPROACH

UNEP Annual Inventory covers most of the UNEP locations worldwide. The EMS team collected data from facilities for UNEP locations worldwide, which include offices with more than 10 people. For the remaining locations where data was still unavailable, a proxy was used to estimate GHG emissions related to facilities based on the headcount number per location. 

Related to air travel emissions, UNEP covers all commercial air travels made by UNEP personnel, staff and participants to major events including some of the MEAs.

OFFSETTING

The UNEP´s Carbon Neutral Fund was set up in 2010 to finance the carbon credits ensuring UNEP’s climate neutrality status. UNEP charges a carbon tax on the GHG emissions from its air travel (staff and participants) and facilities-use as carried out by its divisions. These funds, in addition to providing the resources to buy offsets (Certificates of Emission Reduction) and maintain UNEP’s climate neutrality, also allow green/sustainable initiatives to be organized and executed.

The carbon tax charged every year has two components:  

• The adjustment of the charge made on the emissions from the year before (based on actual data at hand), and 
• An estimated charge for the current year.

In order to calculate these amounts by division, flight emissions are split up by budget line into divisions. Facility emissions are ascertained by duty station and divided by headcount producing a per capita metric, divisional office emissions are then calculated based on the global headcount of a division, multiplying the number of a division’s staff at each duty station by the per capita emission for that duty station. While the magnitude of this charge is small (about 1.3% of travel costs and a charge for building emissions based on divisional headcounts), it is based on actual GHG emissions that in turn depend on flight itineraries, aircraft types, class of travel undertaken, electricity, refrigerant and fuel usage in buildings/ compounds.

Following the “polluter pays” principle, funds are raised through a USD 40 per tCO2eq annual internal tax charged on the emissions related to air travel of each division and regional office. It has usually raised around USD 200,000 yearly.

Estimated emissions for UNEP were 6,487 tonnes CO₂eq in 2022. UNEP until 2019 purchased offsets by choosing available projects from this list here. Since 2020 UNEP decided to offset its emissions via purchases performed by the UN Secretariat.

WASTE MANAGEMENT

UNEP along with the UN system started reporting on waste in 2017. Since then, UNEP has been working on improving waste related data quality and monitoring mechanisms. Several offices, including UNEP HQ, ROLAC and ROAP, have introduced waste management initiatives in the offices: in-office waste sorting, tackling single-use plastics, etc.

Although hazardous waste management fall under the facilities managers responsibilities, a baseline study regarding UNEP’s handling of its own e-waste (i.e., laptops, electronics) will be conducted to further understand  UNEP’s current state in this regard. Currently laptops are donated to schools or taken back by the manufacturer.

Concerning paper, UNEP has since 2014 full control over its procurement and monitored its paper use. As part of the second EMS cycle, an action plan is being developed to reduce paper use in the workplace. The main thrust of this action plan is based on paper reduction by means of improved staff awareness, reducing the number of printers, and establishing of paper use quota for each division and regional office Different initiatives are expected carried out to reduce the paper consumption, for example the release of guidelines to promote the use of electronic signatures and digital approvals to eliminate reliance on paper when possible.

WATER AND WASTEWATER MANAGEMENT

Considering that water reporting is recent in the UN system (since 2018) and that most of the facilities are not equipped with water meters, few offices have reported until now on water use. The offices that do, e.g., UNEP HQ, report based on the area occupied in the facility.

As of 2022, wastewater was still not officially monitored and reported in the UN System. Therefore, there is an opportunity for UNEP to start collecting and reporting data on its wastewater discharged and treated in its offices in the coming years.

OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL MEASURES

Currently, staff awareness initiatives are related to either in-office environmental initiatives (e.g., waste recycling) or events (e.g., World Environment Day, United Nations Environment Assembly), happening on the compound.

In 2021, UNEP conducted a Survey to gauge UNEP´s current Virtual meeting culture to identify challenges and opportunities for the promotion of virtual and hybrid set-ups as part of the new normal. This survey was responded to by more than 300 UNEP personnel and few of the highlights are:

• The pandemic has forced us to make most of these meetings online very quickly, it showed that the transition to virtual meetings is not always seamless; we have seen new issues emerge involving technical challenges, for example related to connectivity or multiple Apps and Remote Simultaneous Interpretation platforms to decide which one will best serve the event. But also challenges to enable participation in virtual set-ups, such as meeting fatigue, and other challenges specific to the meeting type. If left unchecked, these issues can lead to burnout and effectively erase the benefits of taking these meetings digital in the first place, which can increase support of in-person meetings once again.
• Although there is a positive attitude towards continuing organizing meetings and events virtually or hybrid formats, addressing those challenges requires a comprehensive understanding of the current meeting culture so that virtual meetings can be as efficient and effective as possible – saving UNEP personnel time, money, and mental exhaustion while achieving the long-term goal of reducing emissions from air travel.

NEXT STEPS

At UNEP organizational level, and guided by the UNEP EMS Action Plan for 2020-2024, the following activities are planned:

• Integration of environmental risks into enterprise risk management processes.
• Implement staff awareness campaigns and events, during UNEA, World Environment Day and as needed.
• Ensure top management communicates to staff on internal environmental sustainability in townhalls and other occasions.
• Include UNEP’s internal environmental sustainability efforts in the UNEP annual report and website.
• Ensure Member States are informed and updated on UNEP’s internal environmental sustainability efforts.
• Inform Staff and Divisions about their/the organization’s annual environmental performance in the different environmental fields monitored by UNEP, where data is available through divisional meetings and documents.
• Include the environmental sustainability training in the induction package for staff and as a mandatory training.
• Report to and share information with the UNEP Senior Management Team to ensure their involvement and full awareness on environmental sustainability practices.
• Automate data collection processes to improve report frequency on  environmental performance under EMS.

ADDITIONAL LINKS

UN Environment and sustainability

unep.org/explore-topics/resource-efficiency

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