Sustainability practices at WHO

WHO is taking concrete steps to improve its environmental sustainability. The Organization has put forward several initiatives in order to align with the UN 2020-2030 Strategy for sustainability management, including those in the five environmental impact areas and within the six management functions:

• Procurement: WHO has an environmentally friendly procurement policy in place that will be strengthened further.
• Human Resources: The staff association has been working closely with the human resources on the green initiatives and has been considering a special policy on teleworking.
• Facilities: WHO headquarters’ new building will be climate friendly by 2024.
• Travel: WHO Global travel policy has certain provisions to embrace environmental considerations.
• Events: WHO is planning paper and plastic free events, along with more video conferencing with the opening of the new meeting facilities in the new building.
• ICT: Specific measures have been adopted around conferences and virtual meetings, e.g. use of electronic registration, online documents, participation and digital signage to reduce paper consumption; virtual meetings and web streaming to make meetings more accessible and reduce travel.
• Road transport: WHO Fleet Services is supporting WHO offices to lower their emissions related to road transport through rightsizing their fleet, reducing fuel consumption, training drivers on eco driving and purchasing more efficient modern vehicles including electric vehicles.

WHO has its own Environmental Management Procedures (EMP) for its internal environmental due diligence practices, and is actively promoting energy efficient practices.

Moreover, WHO is actively engaged in the interagency activities organized by the United Nations Environment Management Group (EMG) and the Sustainable UN (SUN) team that support and coordinate UN entities’ efforts to go green and become climate neutral. WHO is also part of the Greening the Blue Initiative that was launched to promote the transition of the UN System towards greater environmental sustainability in the management of its facilities and operations.

The COVID-19 crisis has triggered a radical change in the perception and behaviour towards remote/web communications for meetings and conferences – as evidenced by the fact that in 2020 the 73^rd World Health Assembly was virtual – the first event of this scale within the UN system.

Even before the COVID pandemic, WHO has been advancing video conferencing in lieu of travel and promoting use of train/road when applicable: for instance, rail travel has doubled in 2019 compared to 2018. Consequent investments has been made on the audio-visual side in all the meeting rooms with interpretation capacity, to enable meetings with virtual participants, to take place with the 6 official languages.

To reduce its carbon footprint, WHO has adopted a paperless approach and a series of measures at ICT level, including video conferencing, server virtualization, digital transformation, digitalization/electronic workflow/electronic signature, default BW/recto-verso setting, printing reduction, reduction of personal printers, move towards cloud services, green cooling for data center, digital documents for meetings, etc.

WHO is also implementing sustainable practices in in-person events and conferences, such as reducing the food waste and introducing reusable glasses in replacement of single use glasses in the meeting rooms.

Green and sustainable catering services provide vegetarian options and a monthly less meat day at HQ, and the vending machines do not offer sugary drinks or water in plastic bottles.

The new WHO HQ building that is currently under construction was conceived with sustainable energy production at its core and will be climate friendly by 2024. More information can be found in a dedicated brochure.

The vehicles operated by the Geneva headquarters have been replaced by plug in Hybrid and electric vehicles.