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Mitigation and greening

How the Red Cross Red Crescent reduces its carbon footprint and is going green worldwide

Over the past two decades, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement has played a leading role in climate adaptation by reducing the humanitarian risks posed by the climate crisis. The published ambitions of the Movement also call for the reduction of carbon emissions – mitigation – and of our own environmental impact; for a green response, that is. 

The mission of the Climate Centre is to support Movement to reduce climate and extreme-weather impacts on the most vulnerable’ as well as this, we must also make a contribution to the reduction of our own carbon footprint. 

Our key message is that action is urgently needed to address the humanitarian impacts of the climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent impacts worsening whilst greatly scaling up adaptation at the local level. 

The people most affected by the climate crisis are the poorest and most marginalized who have the least capacity to cope and adapt but who also contributed least to the crisis.

Key links

Ambitions to address the climate crisis, International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement 2020
Red Goes Green, 2020 report
Green response
Red Cross Red Crescent strategy on youth-led climate action
ICRC logistics blog, sustainability page
The IFRC eLearning course covers mitigation, sustainable fleets and general sustainability
Managing solid waste: sector-specific guidelines for the Red Cross Red Crescent
Reducing our carbon footprint (British Red Cross webpage)
Greening the Blue (UN-wide initiative)

A green response

Ensuring a green response is essential to honouring the humanitarian injunction to do no harm where we intervene. This requires us to consider environmental risks, the environmental impacts of a crisis, and the potential environmental impacts of our humanitarian action, all the while integrating consideration of such risks and potential impacts into every stage of our work.

The Climate Centre and its partners help promote the IFRC green response during implementation of humanitarian programmes and operations, promoting assessment and investment that advances environmental sustainability with tools that enable simple analysis of the interaction between a humanitarian project and the environment.  

To support National Societies in their own environmental journeys, for example, the IFRC has developed an environmental policy toolkit, which guides an organization through the process.

Red Cross volunteer in a greenhouse supported by the Red Cross in South Hamgyong province, DPRK. (Photo: Mirva Helenius/Finnish Red Cross)

Nature-based solutions
Programmes

Nature-based solutions

One key area that neatly covers both adaptation and mitigation is nature-based solutions, for which the IFRC developed the The Nature Navigator handbook, a sustainable strategy for both adaptation and mitigation.

The Resilient Islands project for the Caribbean – a five-year initiative of the IFRC and The Nature Conservancy – that ended in early 2024, for example, “redefined community resilience by utilizing nature’s protective power against the climate crisis”. In general, young people have been leading the way through our flagship Y-Adapt programme.

IFRC and nature-based solutions

The Movement and mitigation

Innovations in the Movement to support the reduction of carbon emissions are being driven through, for example, the ICRC’s Climate and Environment Transition Fund and guidance for National Societies such as Green Response: Environmental Quick Guide, the Green Logistics Guide, and carbon calculators from the Spanish Red Cross and another embedded in the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations (see box at right).

For more information, please contract richard.casagrande@ifrc.org and (Bann Zahir) bzahir@icrc.org.

Click to reduce your footprint

The Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations

Many National Societies as well as the IFRC, ICRC and the Climate Centre have now signed the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations to galvanize collective action, in particular for those who will feel climate impacts the most.

The charter is guided by the latest scientific evidence and the objectives of the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as other relevant international law and standards.

All these messages are now being spread far and wide by highly sustainable innovations such as this solar radio, which is being used in a programme by the IFRC and the Red Cross Society of Guinea to bring Ebola messaging to people in remote communities. (Photo: Corinne Ambler/IFRC)

Sign the charter here
Toolkits

The environment

We support “rapid and simple project-level environmental screening for humanitarian operations”, in the words of the NEAT+ tool that facilitates analysis of the interaction between a humanitarian project and the environment. To help National Societies manage their own environmental impact, the IFRC developed an environmental policy toolkit, which guides them through their own green response.

Planting, watering, weeding, harvesting and feeding animals are part of life at the Caribbean Christian Centre for the Deaf in Jamaica, with help from the local Red Cross. (Photo: IFRC)

IFRC e-learning resources
The environment
Video

#ClimateChangedMe

The IFRC launched the #ClimateChangedMe campaign in 2021, gathering over 100 community voices in short video clips calling on world leaders meeting at the COP talks to make concrete commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as agreed in Paris in 2015 and address imminent humanitarian impacts of climate change, invest in community adaptation, anticipation systems and local action.

Read more