A draft report by the European Parliament shows directions on how the Erasmus+, European Solidarity Corps and Creative Europe programmes could become greener.
The Committee on Culture and Education (CULT Committee) of the European Parliament (EP) is preparing a report in view of promoting effective measures to ‘green’ Erasmus+, Creative Europe and the European Solidarity Corps (ESC). A draft version of the report was published on 30 March. The outline underlines the importance of physical mobility (without making any reference to the current COVID-19 situation) and the need to reduce the programmes’ environmental impact. The report calls, for example, for better data, new indicators on the topic, clever financial rules that allow to favour certain means of travelling and a teaming up with train and bus companies.
Concerning the next steps, the CULT committee wants to adopt a report on 23 June, which should then be discussed in the EP plenary on 14 September.
The European Commission (EC) presented its Green Deal in December 2019. Preliminary versions included the integration of the concept of ‘green mobility’ into Erasmus+ post-2020, whereas this did not appear anymore in the final version. The CULT committee report tries to show how Erasmus+, ESC and Creative Europe can be fully integrated into the Green Deal.
How Higher Education Institutions can make their mobility and exchange activities greener was also the topic of a webinar that SwissCore organised together with Movetia (the Swiss National Agency for mobility and exchange) and the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) International on 28 April. The webinar intended to collect good practices and discussed how European level action, including through Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), could help to make mobility and exchange greener.