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A small team of Lehigh students is helping the world’s biggest intergovernmental body live up to a lofty goal. The United Nations is demonstrating its commitment to sustainable development by moving toward climate-neutrality, and the students are working with Sustainable United Nations (SUN) to help get them there.

SUN works with UN organizations and agencies to inventory greenhouse gas emissions and develop guidance materials and policy suggestions for reduction. Some Permanent Missions to the UN—offices representing countries at the UN headquarters in New York City—wanted to develop environmental sustainable programs too, but SUN didn’t have the resources to help. That’s where the Lehigh team comes in.

Kevin Mittal ’19 and Mikayla Cleary-Hammarstedt ’18 are designing protocols that will “green” the UN Missions and help them align their facilities and operations with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The project, which began as part of the Mountaintop 2017 summer program and is continuing through the year as a Creative Inquiry project, grew out of the Lehigh University-United Nations Partnership, which focuses on four areas where Lehigh’s strengths align with the UN’s mission: sustainable development, health, gender equity and youth empowerment. Lehigh is one of just nine U.S. universities that belong to the UN’s Global Universities Partnership on Environment for Sustainability (GUPES), and it works closely with the United Nations Environment Programme. Bill Hunter, director of the UN partnership, and Delicia Nahman, Lehigh’s sustainability officer, are advising the students.

“Lehigh’s teaching and learning mission aligns with the UN and we have experience developing a sustainability plan, engaging diverse departments, and aligning our goals with our actions,” says Nahman. “This opportunity fits in well with the Mountaintop Initiative’s vision for student creativity and research. It brings a global vision—the Sustainable Development Goals—to local entities like the individual missions.”

The project is interdisciplinary—both Mittal and Cleary-Hammarstedt are in the IDEAS program (Integrated Degree in Engineering, Arts and Sciences), where he is studying public health and data analysis and she is studying environmental engineering—and hands-on.

“We’re using community challenges as a living laboratory,” says Nahman. “Through this project, Kevin and Mikayla are learning on the job and applying the theories they learned in a more formal setting to have a tangible impact.”

To develop the protocols, Mittal and Cleary-Hammarstedt began by reviewing the sustainability plans of nearly 50 organizations, including universities, cities, corporations and nonprofits, as well as SUN’s existing resources and processes for environmental reporting.

“We were surprised by the density of information and how complex it can be to develop a sustainability plan that works across agencies and offices,” says Cleary-Hammarstedt. “It’s not as simple as just telling people to turn out the lights. Our aim has been to work on developing guidelines that can apply to small offices in a wide array of cultural contexts.”

The students began drafting a manual for these New York City missions that includes initial questions to establish a baseline environmental impact assessment, suggested practices for improving sustainability and links to SUN resources repurposed for small offices.

They also helped SUN prepare for their 10-year milestone review presentation, performing a greenhouse gas inventory data review of the UN agencies and organizations working with SUN to assess their efforts to reduce their environmental footprints.

“This wasn’t part of the initial project, but SUN added it after seeing the students’ work and ability to do research,” says Nahman. “They operated almost like professional employees of SUN.”

Together with Rachel Shields ’18, a graphic design student in Lehigh’s Office of Sustainability, Mittal and Cleary-Hammarstedt developed a report that was presented to the UN Environmental Management Group and Secretary-General António Guterres in September.

For the next year, as a continuation, of the summer research, the students will complete the manual and begin working with select UN Missions to pilot their greening framework. They’ll assess and analyze each mission’s environmental baseline and then develop a customized sustainability policy and action plan. Their ultimate goal is to refine the manual so that any small office can use it on their own to become climate neutral.

“I was attracted to this project because I liked how it allows for creativity and self-direction,” says Mittal. “We can come up with our own ideas and follow them. Now all our work is getting used by actual professionals in the field—it’s crazy that our research will have a measurable impact.