Movetia, the Erasmus Student Network and SwissCore presented good practices of how to ‘green’ educational mobility and discussed European level action.
How to make the higher education sector greener is a topic that has been discussed for a long time. Many higher education institutions (HEI) have taken actions. However, policy makers at HEIs often do not know exactly where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stem from and hence feel unsure of the measures to take. In addition, resistance is often strong, particularly from people promoting internationalisation of the institutions. Nevertheless, there is a growing awareness that mobility of researchers, staff and students contributes substantially to HEI’s GHG emissions and that there is a need to think about how to reconcile international exchange and climate action.
Against this background, the Swiss national agency for mobility and exchange (Movetia), the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) International and SwissCore organised a webinar on how to make Higher Education Institutions’ exchange and mobility greener on 28 April. During the webinar, Movetia presented its good practice collection, and ETH Zurich presented its air travel project “Stay grounded, keep connected”. ETH Zurich has developed a monitoring system and been collecting travel data from its researchers, staff and students for four years. Based on this, the institution developed top-down flight reduction goals and bottom-up action plans. A subsequent academic input contextualised the contribution of student mobility’s GHG emissions in relation to other HEI emissions and explained some of the crucial questions to ask when taking policy decisions. Inputs by the European Commission (EC)’s units on the Erasmus+ implementation and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) presented the current reflections of how the future EU programmes intend to set green standards for their mobility actions.
The documentation of the webinar will be made available soon. Please check the webinar page for links, next week. Do also continue to share good practices and provide input for action by using #GreenerMobilityExchange on social media.
In addition, you might want to have a look at our SwissCore article on the recent activities of the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT Committee) of the European Parliament. They published their draft report in view of promoting effective measures to ‘green’ Erasmus+, Creative Europe and the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) on 30 March.