Facilities Management is a Unit operating under the Office of the Chief, General Services and Security Section, within the Administrative Services Division of ESCAP. The Unit maintains and operates the buildings, their infrastructure and basic services required to keep the buildings functional in addition to office equipment, office supplies, furnishings, offsite storage, and the ESCAP inventory. (click here for more details)

The main office of the Unit is located on the 1st floor of the Secretariat Building, opposite the Security Office. The Property Management Sub-Unit is located on the ground floor next to the elevators.

A Report by World Resources Institute
UNEP, UNDP, and The World Bank

Internal Air Quality (IAQ) is now one of our main priorities and in the past we have contracted outside parties to perform air quality tests for the complex. In order to more closely monitor the air quality situation in the complex we have a portable IAQ station to enable us to take both regular and spot checks of IAQ as and when required.
In addition we are continually upgrading our air conditioning plant and controls in order to provide the best possible IAQ to resident and visitors. For more information concerning our IAQ please visit our "IAQ page" by clicking here.

Smoking is specifically banned in all internal areas of the buildings. As we have a central air-conditioning system those who previously smoked in their offices were in fact polluting the air of their colleagues through a) distribution of smoke through the air ducts and b) distribution of smoke through ambient airflow in the office space. Smoking is prohibited by order of the Medical Service and the Executive Secretary.

"Nonsmokers breathe in the same toxic chemicals in tobacco smoke as the smokers do, with similar, although smaller effects. The smoke nonsmokers breathe is known ad secondhand smoke and the process of breathing secondhand smoke is called involuntary smoking or passive smoking.

The smoke contains thousands of toxic chemicals, including benzene, cyanide, cadmium, lead, radioactive polonium, benzo(a)pyrene, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and nicotine. These chemicals cause many diseases.

Secondhand smoke (or ETS) is a very serious form of indoor air pollution. For example, in the US secondhand smoke causes about 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year, compared to less than 100 lung cancer deaths per year from traditional forms of outdoor air pollution."

WHO The UN and Tobacco.

Filing of documents, periodicals, and publications needs to be strictly controlled by the respective office themselves, and filing rooms need to be correctly furnished and operated. We advise offices to look through their respective files and libraries and ask themselves the question "how long is it since this document was accessed?" Old and rarely used documents should be marked for destruction or for offsite storage. FMU provides offsite storage services to all organizations operating from the complex - for more details click here.

Yes, the building and its contents are insured, if you wish to view the policy or make a claim please click here

For planning purposes FMU utilizes ESCAP standards based on the net usable area (NUA) requirement per person based on the standard organization grading system. It must be borne in mind that because of building layouts and requirement to house increasing numbers of staff that these are standards are used as a guideline and cannot be considered an entitlement. To see the current standards please click here.

This is because we have been forced by the auditors to consolidate requirements for non-standard requests before sending them for procurement. To attempt to improve the delivery time the standard items list is being expanded and the consolidation period has been reduced to two weeks (previously one month).