United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the organization within the UN family mandated to deal with global environmental concerns. The vision for UNEP is to establish itself as “the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, that promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and that serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.”

At the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, it was acknowledged by participating governments that there was “an urgent need for a permanent institutional arrangement within the United Nations for the protection and improvement of the environment,” and in consequence the UNEP was created.

UNEP covers a wide spectrum of activities within six cross-cutting thematic areas: climate change, disasters and conflicts, ecosystem management, environmental governance, harmful substances and hazardous waste, and resource efficiency (i.e., sustainable consumption and production). UNEP is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, but also has major offices in France, Switzerland, and Japan, in addition to six regional offices for Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, and West Asia. Liaising offices are also held with the UN General Assembly and the UN Secretariat in New York, besides offices in Addis Ababa, Brussels, and Cairo, respectively, to link with the African Union, the European Union, and the Arab League.

UNEP is not a project-implementing organization but is rather a value- and knowledge-based entity that acts as an advocate, educator, catalyst, and facilitator in the promotion of environmentally sound solutions and responses to global environmental problems. In this, UNEP is active at international and regional, as well as national, levels.

Since its creation in 1972, UNEP has actively supported major international environmental conferences, notably the UN Conference on Environment and Development—“the Earth Summit”—held in Rio in 1992, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, and is currently engaged in the preparation for the Earth Summit 20 years after Rio, scheduled for 2012. Other major achievements include UNEP's contribution to the process of drafting, signing, and ratifying main international environmental conventions. In this connection, UNEP is hosting the secretariats for several such conventions, for example, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (the CITES convention), the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous and Other Wastes, and the Secretariat for the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol, to name a few.

Within its focus areas, UNEP seeks to strengthen environmental governance by promoting coherence and cooperation among environment-related mechanisms and offering advice based on sound science. At the global, international level, UNEP assists in furthering interlinkages between multilateral environmental agreements and conventions to provide more effective implementation. At the regional and national levels, UNEP provides inputs to the main-streaming of the environment in national and regional action plans and strategies. The expected outputs from these measures are an increased coherence in international decision-making processes and improved abilities at regional and national levels at implementing environmental obligations.

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