WIPO Academy Goes Green
April 16, 2019
On the occasion of Earth Day on April 22, 2019, the WIPO Academy has pledged to reduce its carbon footprint. The Academy will transition gradually to paperless services.
The Academy’s enrollments and registrations for its training courses and programs are now exclusively processed electronically through the WIPO eLearning Center. The feedback surveys distributed after each training course are increasingly available in electronic format in the Professional Development Program, Distance Learning (DL) Program and the Intellectual Property Academic Institutions Program.
The paperless initiative includes the eventual cessation of printed certificates previously provided for successful participants in the advanced DL courses, as the process of printing certificates and mailing them to thousands of participants via airmail to over 190 countries twice a year is both costly and harmful for the environment. The electronic certificate (e-certificate) will continue to be available for each successful participant to download online at the end of a course, similar to the process already applied for the general DL courses. E-certificates are in fact safer since they contain a quick response (QR) code for validation purposes.
Carbon Neutrality at WIPO
The Academy’s environmentally friendly pledge is in line with WIPO’s Carbon Neutrality Project, which was established by Director General Francis Gurry in 2009 as a commitment to environmental responsibility in WIPO practices. Such WIPO approaches to reducing the organization’s carbon footprint are also aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.