HQ: Geneva, Switzerland
Focal Points: David Damian Sandoval and Lyle McFadyen
Email: [email protected] and [email protected]
Internal Sustainability Team: 1 part-time staff
DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE
"The reason UNICC was created 50 years ago, and why we still exist, is because we continue to contribute towards finding the right group of organizations who can come together, collaborate, and make impactful digital solutions for our UN System. In the same vein, we want to leverage UNICC’s technical expertise to collaborate with our UN Partners and make the system better through better adoption of green technologies."
Sameer Chauhan, Director, UNICC
Mission
UNICC is committed to delivering innovative, forward-looking and reliable system-wide solutions in line with the UN Secretary-General’s Strategy on New Technologies, the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation and the Common Agenda. With our world-class Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence, data and analytics practice and an array of platform, software and infrastructure solutions, UNICC serves the entire of the UN family and other international organizations with similar missions and values for the benefit of the world.
FIELD OFFICES
Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland
Additional offices in:
- Valencia, Spain
- New York, USA
- Brindisi, Italy
- Rome, Italy
ALIGNMENT WITH THE STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT IN THE UNITED NATIONS SYSTEM, 2020–2030
As the leading provider of digital tools and cybersecurity services in the United Nations, UNICC focuses it sustainability efforts by leveraging sustainable information technology to replace less efficient activities. Some activities include:
- Designing and constructing a platform to deliver cashless payments for the United Nations Booking Hub
- Assist UN partners to digitally transform the way they do business and deliver their mandates with an emphasis on leveraging technology to streamline business systems, directly impacting SDG 9 and 17
- Reducing the use of paper, by offering a document signature system for the UN family, directly impacting SDG 12: responsible consumption and production; and SDG 13: climate change)
- In Partnership with WHO to develop the mYoga app and working towards the achievement of SDG 3: good health and wellbeing, to achieve Universal Health Coverage by 2030
Internally, UNICC has also run several campaigns for both sustainable office space and a sustainable home office. Examples include,
- Sharing sustainable home office principles to all personnel, to ensure that we remain sustainable even if working remotely
- Banning plastics from the office space
- Sorting all garbage so it can be efficiently recycled
- Instituting the use of reusable water bottles to avoid use of plastic
- Providing volunteer opportunities for environmental activities. These activities include cleaning of public spaces in Brindisi, Italy and “clean the stream” efforts on Long Island, NY.
UNICC has put in place an Environmental Management System (EMS) based on ISO 14001:2019. This includes:
- Documented an environmental policy/strategy approved and supported by top management. This documentation is easily transparent, and clearly structured, and accessible to all UNICC personnel
- Setting environmental objectives and developing and implementing appropriate measures to achieve them
- Identification of environmental impacts of business activities, such as energy and water consumption, emissions, waste management, or supply chain impacts and reporting regularly
- Establishing and implementing controls to monitor the EMS
- Implementing standardized, mandatory environmental awareness training and provided ISO 14001 Lead Implementer training to UNICC and other UN organizations
- Identifying and implementing environmental best practices
- Conducting regular reviews (internal audits) to ensure that UNICC meets the requirements based on the ISO 14001:2019 standard
- Integrated its EMS framework into its other ISO/IEC management systems including, 27001:2022 (Information Security Management), 27701:2019 (Privacy Information Management), 22301:2019 (Business Continuity Management), 20000-1:2018 (IT Service Management), and 9001:2015 (Quality Management Systems) more information is available at https://www.unicc.org/who-we-are/certifications-and-standards/
Emission Reduction
Since 2020 UNICC has reduced the amount of carbon offsets that it needs by 57%. UNICC is eager to continue improving its sustainability posture by identifying ways to leverage information technology to increase sustainability.
EMS and Reduction Efforts
Each year, as part of the Greening the Blue Report on Environmental Governance, each participating UN entity’s progress on the development of an Environmental Management System (EMS) is evaluated according to the UN system’s EMS criteria (these criteria are available on the Methodology webpage). Upon this evaluation the entity is then rated Exceeds, Meets, Approaches, or No response.
Since 2024 UNICC has met the UN system’s EMS criteria requirements is rated as: Meets
Water and Wastewater Management
UNICC has most of its offices in shared locations. As such shares the waste and water mangement with it UN Partners.
Environmental Training for Personnel
Several UNICC personnel have completed the ISO 14001 internal audit training provided by the SUN initiative.
UNICC has hosted ISO 14001 Lead Implementer training for its staff and for other UN organizations. Additional training is planned and will be offered to other organizations.
ENVIRONMENTAL INVENTORY APPROACH
- Office space
- Data centre facilities
Offsetting
OFFSETTING
Since 2020 UNICC has reduced the amount of carbon offsets that it needs by 57%. UNICC has purchased the following offsets (Equivalent to tonne(s) of CO2) to make the organization carbon neutral:
- 2020: 800 CERS
- 2021: 600 CERS
- 2022: 400 CERS
- 2023: 382 CERS
- 2024: 346 CERS
- UNICC Director’s Reports: https://www.unicc.org/category/resources/directors-report/
- UNICC Biennial Report 2024–2025: https://www.unicc.org/our-impact/resources/biennial-report-2024-2025/
- UNICC - Sustainable home office poster