The UN celebrates WED by 'Greening the Blue'

On World Environment Day, 5 June 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon publicly called on all UN agencies, funds and programmes to become climate neutral and ‘go green’.

Since then a common approach to measuring greenhouse gas emissions has been agreed across the UN family, and in 2009 the UN published baseline details of its greenhouse gas emissions for 2008.

Now, a new website has been developed to improve the UN’s communications on it’s internal sustainability performance.

Greening the Blue is being launched on Friday 4 June as part of the celebrations for World Environment Day (Saturday 5 June).

The website shows what is happening to make the UN more sustainable and provides advice to staff on how they can contribute. More specifically the website includes:

The greenhouse gas inventories of 49 UN organizations
Case studies from different UN organizations on what they’re doing to ‘go green’
A one-minute animation showing staff how they can help (available from 4 June)
Detailed tips and tools for staff in reducing their personal carbon footprints

If you’d like to get involved in Greening the Blue, visit www.greeningtheblue.org/get-involved

Further information

Greening the Blue is a Sustainable United Nations initiative launched in cooperation with the UN Environment Programme and the UN Environment Management Group.

For more information about Greening the Blueplease contact greeningtheblue@unep.org or call Imogen Martineau on 0044 207 841 8939.