Dear Comrades,
The Universal Postal Union is setting up a new carbon offsetting programme for the world’s posts.
The programme will take the form of a fund to pay for
environmental improvement projects to counter the impact of the mail and
shipping activities of participating posts on climate change emissions.
Unlike other carbon offsetting programmes in the industry, the UPU
intends to use funds to support low-carbon postal projects in the
developing world.
The fund is expected to be registered in Switzerland later this
month, with ten postal services initially taking part as founding
members, including La Poste, Swiss Post and Thai Post.
Patrick Wildloecher, chairman of the UPU’s sustainable development
project group, said: “This flexible funding mechanism will collect and
allocate funds made available by Posts that want to offset their carbon
emissions against low-carbon postal projects in developing countries.”
The UPU, a UN-affiliated agency representing the world’s national
postal administrations, said national Posts across the world generated
60m tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2012, or 0.2% of global carbon dioxide
emissions, according to its survey of 127 countries.
More than 92% of these emissions come from Posts in industrialised countries, the UPU Said.
Berne-based UPU said 19.5% of Posts’ emissions were generated by
buildings, 20.5% by vehicle fleets, 21% by subcontractors and 38.5% by
air freight.
The UPU’s annual carbon inventory will help to identify projects to
be supported by the offsetting fund. The agency already advises postal
operators on ways to cut their environmental footprints.
A number of postal services already offset their carbon emissions,
with La Poste and Swiss Post among those who pay for environmental
improvement projects to reflect the climate change emissions that
certain services generate.
IPC
The International Post Corporation, the Brussels-based association of
24 postal operators, has been running a sustainability programme for
five years, and its 25 participants have achieved a 19.4% reduction in
their carbon emissions during that time, a 1.6m tone cut in emissions –
close to the 20% target set for the year 2020.
The IPC said last week that the Environmental Measurement and
Monitoring System, as the programme is called, needs to reduce carbon
dioxide emissions by only 50,000 tonnes to hit the 2020 target.
In 2012, the programme achieved a 435,000-tonne cut in emissions,
compared to the previous year, or 5% of participants’ total emissions.
The IPC suggested that alternative vehicles and the use of renewable
energy were gaining momentum among the programme members. Since the
start of the programme in 2009, participants have extended their use of
lower-carbon vehicles from 56,000 vehicles to 90,000.
Herbert-Michael Zapf, the IPC president and CEO, said the
organisation was now going to review the programme’s targets in light of
the progress made so far.
“The exceptional efforts of our participants have brought us within
striking distance of our goal to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020
compared to 2008 many years ahead of schedule,” he said. “We should,
however, not be complacent.”
http://postandparcel.info
