UN Environment Programme Brand Guidelines: The Nairobi Body and Its Laurel Emblem

Born at a 1972 conference, housed in the Global South.

The United Nations Environment Programme, or UNEP, came out of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm from 5 to 16 June 1972. English Wikipedia gives 5 June as its formation date. The formal step came later that year: the General Assembly adopted Resolution 2997, on institutional and financial arrangements for international environmental co-operation, on 15 December 1972 by 116 votes to none with 10 abstentions, the UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library records. That month, English Wikipedia says, the Assembly elected the Canadian diplomat Maurice Strong, who had led the Stockholm conference, as the first head.

UNEP is a programme, not a specialised agency. The Wilson Center’s 2021 summary of Maria Ivanova’s book on the organisation calls it “a subsidiary body rather than a specialized agency,” meant to be “the world’s environmental conscience”: an anchor that set norms and researched policy and left others to carry out its recommendations. Member states run it through what is now the UN Environment Assembly. English Wikipedia says the Assembly replaced a Governing Council of 58 states after a December 2012 General Assembly decision, has 193 members, and first met in Nairobi in June 2014.

Its home was fought over. English Wikipedia says developed countries preferred Geneva, while developing countries wanted Nairobi, and that Mexico City, New Delhi and Cairo pulled out of the running to support the Kenyan capital. Writing in February 2013, Andrew Steer, then of the World Resources Institute, called it the first UN body located in a developing country. It remains in Nairobi, at the UN Office there, which also hosts UN-Habitat.

Treaties, science and hosted secretariats.

Much of UNEP’s work happens through agreements and bodies it helped to create. Steer credited it with a key role in the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting gases and in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which English Wikipedia says UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization set up in 1988. UNEP hosts the secretariats of several treaties, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, CITES and the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Its Regional Seas Programme dates from 1974.

It also has a public face. English Wikipedia dates World Environment Day, held each 5 June, to 1973, and records the Champions of the Earth awards, given annually since 2005 as the successor to the Global 500 Roll of Honour of 1987.

Recent work includes plastics. On 2 March 2022, UN News reported, the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi endorsed a resolution to forge a legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution by the end of 2024. That date passed without a treaty, and English Wikipedia describes a further negotiating session in Geneva in August 2025 as a failure, after which UNEP’s executive director, Inger Andersen, said nations would need time to regroup.

Its record is argued over. Steer wrote in 2013 that, as it entered its fifth decade, “few can believe that UNEP is equipped for the magnitude of the task ahead,” citing voluntary funding and its subsidiary status, and arguing that the root cause was that governments do not give environmental issues the seriousness they give economic ones. Money has been a long-running issue: in the Christian Science Monitor in February 1987, Rafe Pomerance wrote that the United States had halved its contributions over three years. In 2007, English Wikipedia says, a “Paris Call for Action” backed by 46 countries asked for UNEP to be replaced by a stronger UN Environment Organization. Ivanova’s book takes the other side of one familiar argument, countering the claim that UNEP was deficient by design and arguing, in the Wilson Center’s summary, that it delivered on much, though not all, of its mandate.

Its leadership has also faced scrutiny. On 20 November 2018, Reuters reported, Erik Solheim said he had resigned as executive director after receiving a final audit of his official travel; a draft, The Guardian had reported, found he travelled for 529 of the 668 days audited. RTÉ reported that the UN’s spokesman did not say the audit findings had led to the resignation. English Wikipedia says the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark stopped or withheld funding during the affair. His deputy, Joyce Msuya, stepped in temporarily, and Andersen was appointed in February 2019.

Emblems, flags and field presence.

United Nations bodies share a family look that began with a single conference pin. The UN’s own emblem, a world map seen from the North Pole, was first set between crossed laurel branches and then between two olive branches, UN News recorded in 2009, and the General Assembly adopted a revised version in December 1946. Other bodies in the system have their own marks; English Wikipedia says the World Health Organization’s features the Rod of Asclepius, and it lists a family of agency flags derived from the UN’s.

Blue does much of the work. The UN Flag Code, issued in 1947 and amended in 1952, puts the white emblem on a blue field at fixed proportions, and the Code bars the flag from commercial use. On the ground the same marks appear on working equipment: UN News described the emblem on peacekeepers’ helmets, on helicopters and trucks carrying aid, and on leaflets. In refugee camps, English Wikipedia says, sleeping accommodation is frequently tents, prefabricated huts or dwellings built from local materials.

Paper is the other public face of these bodies. Reports, resolutions and flagship publications carry the name year after year: UNDP’s Human Development Report dates from 1990. Language is part of the system too. The UN’s six official languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, and some bodies change their initials with the language, as UNDP does with PNUD in French and Spanish.

Use of these names and marks is restricted. General Assembly resolution 92(I) of 1946 prohibits use of the UN’s emblem, seal, name and initials without the Secretary-General’s authorisation, in particular for commercial purposes, a UNOPS instruction of 2020 explains. This guide therefore sets out what can be checked about each body’s founding, name and visual history, and reproduces no emblem, flag or logo.

A human figure inside a laurel crown.

The clearest record of the identity is a Visual Identity Manual dated March 2017, available through the document library of the UN-REDD Programme. It says it replaces earlier Graphic Standards and sets out a system for the organisation’s logo, colour and type.

It begins with the name. The manual says the official name is the United Nations Environment Programme, but that in public-facing communication the organisation preferred “UN Environment” to the acronym UNEP. General Assembly papers, Environment Assembly papers and legal instruments were to keep the full name. English Wikipedia says the organisation was referred to as UN Environment from 2017 to 2020, and it gives UNEP as the abbreviation today.

The manual describes the emblem as a human figure confined in a circle and surrounded by a laurel crown, with the organisation’s name. It comes in two versions: a Short Signature for public-facing work and a Full Signature for official and legal documents. Versions are set out for the six official UN languages and Portuguese, and offices may not create new language versions themselves. The clear space around the logo must equal at least half the height of the emblem.

Colour comes down to one ink. The logo is cyan blue, the manual says, obtained by printing with Process Cyan at 100%, one of the four basic printing colours, which it calls widely used and well known. In cyan, the logo should sit on white or on a 10% cyan background; other backgrounds are excluded. On coloured images it must appear in white.

For type, the manual names Roboto for English, French, Spanish and Russian, Noto Sans CJK for Chinese and Noto Kufi for Arabic, all open-source families developed by Google. For reports, publications with an ISBN should carry the short logo on the front cover, ideally top right, and the full logo on the back, ideally bottom left.

Use of the emblem is restricted. The manual says the logo and its visual identity are for the exclusive use of the organisation, and that third-party use generally requires prior written consent. It tells staff to treat the logo with “caution, dignity and diligence,” and never to modify or recreate it.

For a design guide, UN Environment Programme shows how one emblem can carry a full official name and a shorter public one across many languages, using a single printing ink as its colour rule. Compare the United Nations, whose system it sits within, and UNDP, another UN programme. For this guide we use a deep lagoon, a pale mist and a laurel green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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