UNICEF Supply Scope 3 – Greenhouse Gas Emissions Baseline
A comprehensive assessment of the Greenhouse Gas emissions embedded in UNICEF’s supply chains.
About
UNICEF Supply Scope 3 – Greenhouse Gas Emissions Baseline underlines UNICEF’s commitment to transparency and to the climate agenda. It highlights our commitment to our partners in supply chains, as outlined in the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan, in both mitigating the emissions from our supply chains and operations, as well as in contributing to adaptation and resilience of national social services, through high-quality products and services.
UNICEF undertook this comprehensive assessment of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions embedded in our supply chains (or ‘scope 3’ emissions) to understand where our hot spots and exposures are and prioritize actions to address these hot spots, to set evidence-based targets, and to initiate a monitoring and reporting framework that will allow us to transparently track progress over time.
Scope 3 emissions are defined by the GHG Protocol, which identifies three different scopes for GHG measurement, reduction and mitigation. Scope 1 is an organization’s direct emissions, produced, for example, by its fleet of vehicles, or its generators. Scope 2 are indirect emissions linked to the electricity, heating, and cooling used in offices.
Scope 3 are indirect emissions, such as those related to the production of purchased goods and services, staff travel, treatment of waste, etc. Calculating scope 3 emissions is the most complicated out of the three scopes and are also often 11.4 times that of a company’s direct emissions.
Narrative Report and Compendium
This Narrative Report is complemented by a compendium with additional details on the methodology, assumptions, and findings for product categories identified as hot spots in the scope 3 baseline assessment. The analysis was conducted in 2023 for the 2019 baseline. Many of the recommendations are already underway, and thus, this Narrative Report and Compendium should be viewed as a snapshot. UNICEF is working to continually improve our analysis and ramp-up climate actions.
Supply chains
Limiting global temperature rises to 1.5oC entails GHG reductions of 90 per cent across all scopes 1, 2 and 3 (throughout operations and supply chains) by 2050, and shorter-term reductions of at least 45 per cent vs. pre-industrial levels by 2030.
With the largest procurement volumes in the United Nations, UNICEF has an important role to act on climate and sustainability through our supply chains.
UNICEF has made significant progress since 2015 to:
- report our direct operational emissions (scopes 1, 2, and scope 3 business travel);
- reduce avoidable emissions; and
- offset unavoidable emissions through purchasing Carbon Credits from the Adaption Fund via the Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The next critical step is to start to transition our supply chain to more sustainable supplies that can safeguard children today without compromising the well-being of children tomorrow.
Sustainability agenda
Climate action is an essential component of UNICEF’s broader sustainability agenda, and many of the challenges in addressing scope 3 mitigation also apply to our related sustainability challenges. Climate action is pursued along with efforts in circular economy and waste reduction, elimination of hazardous and toxic exposures, access-to and reliability-of clean water, clean air, social priorities for labor and children, as well as localization in program countries, economic, ethical, and equity priorities, among others.
Globally, approximately 1 billion children – nearly half of the world’s children – live in countries that are at an ‘extremely high-risk’ from the impacts of climate change, according to the Children’s Climate Risk Index.
Operations and supply chains
Scope 3 emissions for UNICEF’s international supply, which are calculated through Supply Division (SD), were estimated to be 3.9 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt of CO2e) in 2019 – equivalent to approximately 870,000 cars in one year. This represents more than 98 per cent of UNICEF’s total emissions in 2019 (scopes 1 and 2 totaled 0.03 Mt CO2e). The scope 3 estimate incorporates emissions within the operational control of UNICEF SD and excludes scopes 1 and 2, and scope 3 outside SD control. 2019 was chosen as the baseline year to avoid temporal impacts on procurement resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
UNICEF has more to learn, but this analysis addresses the major drivers of UNICEF’s overall scope 3 emissions (the procurement of international goods and services via SD).
Engaging suppliers
Four major product categories were found to drive 80–90 per cent of UNICEF’s international supply scope 3 emissions – vaccines, nutrition, cold chain equipment and international freight. Emissions reduction efforts for scope 3 should therefore focus on these product categories where the emissions footprint is most concentrated. Engaging suppliers on what can be done to reduce emissions is critical to moving towards a science-based emission reduction trajectory.
The benefit of the insights contained in this report is that emissions are relatively concentrated in specific product markets and therefore initial actions where opportunities for carbon emissions reductions are greatest, can be instituted with a relatively limited number of suppliers.
