Erasmus Goes Green Erasmus Project

Project Title

Erasmus Goes Green

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions; Environment and climate change; Transport and mobility

Project Summary

Preventing climate change is one of the key priorities of the European Union (EU). This is reflected in its Europe 2020 Strategy, which highlights sustainable growth as one of its priorities, and more recently, in the roadmap of the European Green Deal, where the ambition of having no net emissions of greenhouse gases in Europe by 2050 has been enshrined.

Erasmus+ is one of the EU’s main instruments to support growth, jobs, equity and social inclusion, with 400,000 students, trainees and staff going abroad every year. The success of the Erasmus programme has prompted the European Commission to propose doubling the budget of the next Erasmus programme (2021-2027) to EUR 30 billion. If enforced, this would result in an increase in the number of mobilities and in a larger ecological footprint of the programme.

While the benefits of spending time abroad for studying, training or teaching on key competences and skills (multilingualism, digital competences, interpersonal skills, sense of European citizenship, cultural awareness and employability) have been well documented, little attention has been paid to the carbon footprint of the Erasmus+ programme.

Against this backdrop, and to ensure the sustainable growth of the Erasmus programme, the Erasmus Goes Green (EGG) project aims to reduce the transport-related carbon footprint of higher education students and staff taking part in mobility activities within Europe across the three key actions of the programme. To achieve this, the EGG consortium will develop an IT tool that will allow students and staff to visualise the CO2 footprint of the different means of transport that they can use to go on mobility abroad. The visualisation tool will present them with relevant comparisons, incentives and options to engage in behaviours that minimise and ultimately offset their carbon emissions. Additionally, the EGG consortium will put forward targeted policy recommendations aiming at including environmental principles in the structure of the next Erasmus programme, ensuring systemic change and greener exchanges.

Five universities (UVSQ, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Lapland UAS, University of Lodz, Erasmus University of Rotterdam), the largest student network in Europe (ESN) and the European University Foundation (EUF), a network of more than 60 innovative universities spread across Europe, join forces to put this project into practice.

The CO2 visualisation tool and the policy recommendations will be the result of four intellectual outputs that will guide the work from the research stage (IO1) to the development, testing and piloting of the IT tool (IO2), the definition and incorporation of incentives and offsetting alternatives (IO3), and the production of guidelines and policy recommendations (IO4) to ensure the dissemination, uptake and long-term impact of the project results.

The EGG project will put information at the fingertips of higher education students and staff and empower them to make more conscious and environmentally-friendly decisions when going on mobility abroad. At the same time, it will aim at embedding environmental principles in the core functioning of the Erasmus programme to support the sustainable implementation of its three key actions and the accurate monitoring and offsetting of its CO2 footprint. In doing so, the EGG project will not only increase the environmental awareness of the ultimate beneficiaries of the programme, but also spread good practice examples among higher education institutions and encourage policy makers to embrace sustainable internationalisation strategies. In the short and medium term, this will help to bring the Erasmus programme closer to carbon neutrality, ultimately contributing to the global fight against climate change.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 281760 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITE DE VERSAILLES SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES. & Country: FR

Project Partners

• ERASMUS STUDENT NETWORK AISBL
• EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION-CAMPUS EUROPAE
• ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS
• LAPIN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• UNIWERSYTET LODZKI
• ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM