The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is proud to publish its Climate Resilient & Sustainable Operations Roadmap — a milestone in how IRC intends to embed climate resilience and environmental responsibility into the way it buys, builds, moves, and delivers across more than 40 countries.
The roadmap includes 20 solutions, 30 priority projects, and strategies across eight operational domains — procurement, freight, buildings and energy, waste, fleet, travel, climate risk-informed resilience, and cross-cutting coordination. It is shaped by IRC's first organization-wide emissions estimate and a global assessment of climate risks and opportunities across operations. It was developed over 12 months in partnership with the Climate Action Accelerator, an initiative dedicated to scaling up environmental and climate solutions within organizations and reach a net-zero future in time. IRC prioritizes long-term emissions reductions as part of its aspiration to contribute to a net-zero future, and this is reflected in this roadmap.
The climate crisis is reshaping the contexts where IRC operates. Weather-related disasters have caused 250 million internal displacements in the past decade. Humanitarian needs are at record levels, and the climate is settling into a new normal that is hotter, more volatile, and less forgiving. The systems that have powered humanitarian delivery for decades carry environmental costs, making it more important than ever that how humanitarian organizations deliver is as intentional as what they deliver. This roadmap is IRC's response. It addresses both resilience and environmental responsibility together, because in the settings where IRC operates, they cannot be separated.
This work was made possible by the generous support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), whose funding and vision for climate action in the humanitarian sector enabled this roadmap.