Together with the Finnish National Agency for Education, Nordic Offset has assessed the greenhouse gas emissions and their compensation options of the Erasmus+ programme. The aim of the assessment was to provide information on how to reduce emissions to support decision making.
Erasmus+ is an European Union programme that supports education, young people and sports. The programme provides over four million Europeans with an opportunity to study and gain experiences abroad. The budget of the current programme of seven years is 14.7 million euros. The plan is to increase the budget by 50% for the next term of 2021–2027 (European Council 2020).
The assessment included a scenario review of the offset options for the greenhouse gas emissions of the new Erasmus+ programme in 2021–2027. The assessment handled the following themes:
- An analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions from the flights related to the programme in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
- The creation of scenarios on future greenhouse gas emissions with different hypotheses.
- An analysis of the compensation markets
- Proposal on viable offset options
The assessment is based on the idea that the first step towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to measure the carbon footprint of your operations, the second to implement the possible measures to reduce the carbon footprint, and finally, to compensate the remaining carbon footprint.
The assessment produced a report that will be delivered to all national offices of the Erasmus+ programme. The report is available in an electronic format here.