Greener International Organizations?
Over the past two decades, increasing attention has been trained on the environmental footprint of public actors and enterprises. International organizations (IOs) have not escaped this scrutiny. On June 15, 2007, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly called upon organizations under the aegis of the United Nations to “go green.” The UN Climate Neutral Strategy was accepted in October 2007. Following this decision, the program titled Greening the Blue was launched, with the aim of fulfilling three commitments: measuring, reducing, and offsetting. Agency chiefs made a commitment to add data on waste management from 2016, on the use of drinking water resources from 2018, and on staff training in 2019. Although the process is not mandatory, since 2009 the UN has presented an annual assessment: 67 entities have taken part in calculating their carbon emissions for the 2017, and 56 have provided data on waste management.
The studies conducted on the greening of IOs such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organisation) have often shown evidence of mainly symbolic gestures – greenwashing. Yet, the environmental damage caused by the action of IOs can have dramatic consequences. For example, the impact linked to the presence of refugee camps supervised by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees means that refugees’ prospects for protection are prejudiced, because it causes (or serves as a justification for) host governments to refuse the right to asylum. The cas of peacekeeping operations is also significant. Nine months after the Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, the poor management of waste water in a camp used by Blue Helmets as part of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti triggered a cholera epidemic which led to the deaths of more than 9,000 people and affected almost 780,000 others. It took over five years for the UN to accept responsibility.
Environmental footprint of actions carried out by the United Nations system, 2016
Comment: Peace missions carry a substantial ecological footprint, accounting for more than half the UN’s greenhouse gas emissions (together with a higher-than-average production of waste). Other programs, even important ones, produce only a few percentages of emissions each. But when calculated per person, these emissions can vary up to threefold (very high at the World Bank and the IAEA). Estimated in this way, the total of these UN emissions are equivalent to those of Laos or Iceland.
- environmental footprint > Ecological footprint
- Pressure exerted on ecosystems by human societies. This indicator measures the impact of human activities by assessing the total biologically productive area necessary for different types of lifestyle, in order to produce the resources they consume and absorb the waste they generate. The values obtained (measured in global hectares per capita) vary substantially from the more predatory to the less predatory societies (between 5 and 10 gha for North America and some European countries, to less than 1 gha for India, Indonesia and part of Africa). This indicator is also used more broadly to measure the impacts of actions by an individual or institution (private companies, international organizations, specific projects, etc.) in terms of environmental degradation.
- International organizations > International Organization
- In the words of Clive Archer, an IO is “a formal, continuous structure established by agreement between members (governmental and/or non-governmental) from two or more sovereign states with the aim of pursuing the common interest of the membership.” Marie-Claude Smouts identifies three characteristics of IOs: they arise out of a “founding act” (treaty, charter, statute), have a material existence (headquarters, finance, staff), and form a “coordination mechanism.
- greenwashing > Greenwashing
- Greenwashing, also called “green sheen, describes an action designed to mislead consumers with regard to a company’s environmental practices or the environmental benefits of a product or service. It can make use of evasive language, suggestive images and/or irrelevant claims. More broadly the aim is to distract attention by foregrounding minor actions on behalf of the environment while covering up more serious environmental damage and the deeper causes of environmental degradation.
- environmental > Environment
- In broad terms, the environment is understood as the biosphere in which living species cohabit, while ecology studies the relations between these organisms and their environment. The environment encompasses very diverse natural areas from undisturbed virgin forests to artificialized environments planned and exploited by humans. In a more limited definition of the term, “environmental” issues are those relating to natural resources (their management, use and degradation) and biological biodiversity (fauna and flora). As a cross-cutting public concern, the environment encompasses issues of societal organization (production models, transport, infrastructure, etc.) and their impacts on the health of humans and ecosystems.
- peacekeeping > Peacekeeping
- The UN defines peacekeeping as “a technique designed to preserve the peace, however fragile, where fighting has been halted, and to assist in implementing agreements achieved by the peacemakers” (Capstone Doctrine, 2008). It is different from peacemaking, which relates to conflicts currently under way, and to peace enforcement, which involves coercive measures including the use of force. The concept of peacebuilding refers both to the complex process of creating the conditions for sustainable peace and to targeted measures designed to reduce the risk of a return to conflict and to lay the foundations for sustainable development. These are the principles that guide the conduct of peace missions – principles that have at times attracted criticism.