01 Making real choices

As stated in Strategy 2024, one of the pillars of EUR’s strategy for making a positive impact on society is “Taking Responsibility on Sustainable Development”. Our goal is to embed sustainability in everything we do, make it part of our very DNA, and EUR staff and students all have a role to play in making this happen. The image below shows how sustainability is positioned within the EUR strategy. 

We outlined our ambitions regarding sustainability in 2019 and have since fleshed these out with more concrete plans and activities. The key elements of these are presented in this 2021 progress report.

Our approach to sustainability is holistic, in that we examine every aspect of our operations to see what we need to change to become more eco-positive. By ‘eco-positive’, we mean going beyond doing no harm to the environment to actually adding more value to it. This obviously includes becoming carbon neutral or positive, but it also relates to our use and generation of resources, and to our contribution to human well-being. This is all part of our responsibility to the planet as a whole. But to bring this closer to home, working towards the goal of an eco-positive campus is not only beneficial to the natural environment and to future generations, but it also supports the health and well-being of our current staff and students, and bolsters their pride in being Erasmians. Moreover, becoming eco-positive will do wonders for the university’s image, helping us attract the brightest students and most talented staff by positioning EUR as a healthy an inspiring place to study and work.

Members of the Erasmus community have increasingly stressed the need for an ambitious sustainability policy to be put into practice at the earliest possible opportunity. We have a clear vision of what an eco-positive university entails and how this would translate into an implementation programme. Essentially, it demands deep systemic change away from a fossil-based, consumption-driven growth-oriented model of development. It will not be enough to do a little less of this and a bit more of that. Rather, what’s required is fundamental change, which demands bold institutional policy. In short, we must go beyond low hanging fruit and easy solutions, and this report describes how we’re doing so!

Our objective is to continue embedding sustainability in our educational and research activities, as well as in our partnerships and operations and across the EUR community. In fact, we will be stepping up our efforts in these areas in accordance with the level of urgency revealed by recent developments (COVID-19, rising energy prices and the increasingly visible effects of climate change).

The key issues we’re tackling in 2022 are the development and implementation of the Energy Roadmap (a.k.a. Instellingsroutekaart), the Sustainable Real Estate Policy, the Green Campus Plan, the Compete for Excellence project to stimulate the protein transition from animal based to plant based food and the Sustainability Dashboard to monitor progress by measuring a selected set of key indicators. Two amazing and sustainable new buildings will also open this year: an educational building and a sports centre.