Five years after they said they’d get right on it, more than one-quarter of UN organizations have done nothing about their carbon footprint.

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According to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, five years ago something important happened. Executives employed by the UN pledged to “move their organizations toward climate neutrality” (see p. 2 here).

But the recently-released, 2012 edition of Moving Towards a Climate Neutral UN, admits that only 36 UN agencies “have started work on emission reduction strategies” (my italics). Only 10 of those:

have achieved senior management approval for their strategies, making emission reduction efforts part of corporate policy.

Forty-nine UN bodies are listed on pages six and seven of that report. This means that, five years after they said they’d get right on it, more than one-quarter of UN bodies (13 out of 49) have done nothing about their carbon footprint.

Of the 36 that have taken steps, only 10 have successfully adopted emissions reduction as “corporate policy.”

Ten UN organizations out of 49 appear to have responded in a serious manner to their leader’s five-year-old clarion call.

Yeah, these people think we’re in the midst of a climate emergency.

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Among the other tidbits in the above-mentioned report:

• the UN has failed to set binding, across-the-board emissions targets for its own organizations (p. 8)
• Ban Ki-moon still fantasizes that all the nations of the world are going to sign “a new, comprehensive, legally binding agreement” to reduce emissions (p. 2)
• 50% of UN-generated carbon emissions are the result of air travel (p. 3)
• there seems to be a preoccupation with reducing business class flights by staff rather than reducing the total number of flights (pp. 3 and 5)
• the UN employs more than 221,000 people (p. 7)

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Read the report here (backed up here)

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