ENVIRONMENT: U.N. Tries to Put Its Own House in Order

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By Elizabeth Whitman UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 (IPS) - In the past few years, United Nations headquarters in New York has undergone a transformation. Besides renovating the entire building, the U.N. is trying, as a leading international organisation, to take more responsibility and set an example for environmentally-friendly, sustainable practices by implementing such changes as cutting back on printing, posting more documents online, and creating water-saving measures.But while the organisation is moving in the right direction, the pace of change has been slow. Transparency and accountability, and high levels of consumption, are also persistent issues. "When I became secretary-general, I made climate change one of my top priorities," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in 2010. "Climate change affects everything the U.N. does - poverty, peace and security, development, and human rights." Ban has reiterated his stance on the importance of dealing with global climate change and sustainable energy on numerous occasions throughout his term. At the beginning of this year, the secretary-general listed mitigating climate change as one of his top priorities for the year 2011. Statements on the importance of mitigating climate change abound, but information and statistics on the U.N.'s own environmental practices can be difficult to come by, with limited information readily available to the public. Statistics also tend to underscore how much is saved and present comparative data, in some cases disguising how much energy or paper the U.N. departments actually consume. Positive but slow growth The U.N. and certain branches within it have gradually made improvements and implemented more "green" and sustainable practices. In 2010, for example, the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM) stopped distributing printing documents in the Secretariat, instead posting them online, the culmination of an initiative begun in the 1990s. According to the DGACM, this has saved 70 million sheets of paper between 2009 and 2010. Since 2009, the U.N. has required that all photocopy and printer paper be 100 percent recycled content, a change that has "contributed greatly to the greening of the organisation," said the Office of Central Support Services (OCSS). "Cool U.N.", a policy begun in 2008, has raised average room temperatures in the summer and lowered them in the winter in an effort to conserve energy. And in 2010, the U.N. recycled nearly 1,000 tonnes of mixed and white paper. Still, as reporters and employees at the U.N. frequently observe, documents and reports often find their way into the trash not long after being issued, with many having gone unread. According to the DGACM, U.N. staff in the Secretariat consumed just fewer than 60 million sheets of paper in 2010 solely for photocopying and office printing purposes. A congested system The U.N. has a longstanding reputation as being inefficient and more prone to lofty rhetoric than to concrete action. Earlier this year, the New York Times called it a "bloated... bureaucracy" in reference not only to the hundreds of U.N. umbrella organisations whose missions often tend to overlap, but also to the staggering amounts of documents and reports printed regularly at its offices around the world. The DGACM disagrees, saying the U.N. has "a longstanding commitment to our environment - to ensure that it becomes more efficient in its operations and in its use of energy and resources." U.N. officials did not answer repeated questions regarding how much money had been saved in the switch from printed to online documents. Rather, the OCSS insisted, "The switch from print to web was done, of course, to contribute to the secretary-general's goal of climate neutrality." Possibilities for the future The Capital Master Plan, a five-year, 1.87-billion-dollar project to renovate the U.N. headquarters in New York, includes various measures that will ultimately improve the U.N.'s environmental performance through improvements to ventilation systems, the use of high efficiency lights, and the implementation of a rainwater harvesting system to reduce consumption of fresh water, among other new measures and requirements. Overall these changes are predicted to reduce the U.N.'s carbon footprint by 45 percent. Completion of the project is scheduled for 2013. In the meantime, activists say the U.N. has a responsibility uphold the values it preaches. "A building like the U.N. headquarters, which is a global symbol of cooperation, presents a remarkable opportunity to showcase how energy efficient buildings can contribute to the growth of low-carbon mega cities," Andy Darrell, New York regional director and the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDS) deputy director of its national energy programme, told IPS. The EDS is a non-profit organisation that works to find cost-efficient solutions to the world's environmental problems. "Virtually any environmental issue can be positively affected by the way we design and use our buildings," he added. The fact that major changes to decrease UNHQ's energy consumption have only begun in the past few years suggests that the U.N. is certainly not the vanguard of environmentally-friendly measures. Although major change always takes time and no organisation is perfect, the implementation of sustainable practices is not just an issue in itself but may also represent many of the infrastructural issues embedded within the U.N. system. Find out more about the forces behind climate change - but also about the growing citizen awareness and new climate policies towards sustainable development http://ipsnews.net/climate_change/