Sustainable Mobility
At Maastricht University, we’re rethinking the way we move. With thousands of students and staff commuting daily, mobility is a major factor in our environmental impact. That’s why we are working towards a university where sustainable travel is the default, not the exception.
Our ambition is to drastically reduce carbon emissions from commuting and business travel. To do so, we promote and support cycling, public transport, and possibly shared mobility solutions. We also work to remove practical barriers that may prevent sustainable choices—such as complicated reimbursement systems or lack of facilities. Whether you're biking to campus, hopping on a train to a conference, or joining a meeting online instead of flying, every step counts. It’s not just about cutting emissions, but about creating a healthier, more connected university. Because sustainable mobility isn’t just good for the planet—it’s good for all of us.
A necessary condition to reduce UM’s carbon emissions, is to have a clear picture of our current emissions. Therefore, we started the data collection in 2025 for 2024. For business travel, we collected data with respect to costs, business flights (place of departure and arrival), travel class, train kilometres, and much more. Based on the available data, business travel emissions were 3,155 t kg CO2e in 2024. Although this is substantial, we do not know yet what the share of business travel emissions is off UM’s total emissions because we are currently still calculating emissions for other categories.
The calculations and analysis did reveal some interesting insights though:
- ~71% of UM’s business travel emissions are because of flights (representing ~61% of km travelled by the UM)
- ~0.48% of UM’s business travel emissions are because of train trips (~19% of kilometres travelled)
- FHML, SBE and FSE flew the most in 2024; 39.2%, 25.3% and 10.2% of total number of flights respectively.
Some other interesting facts about business travel emissions:
- One retour flight Amsterdam – NY exceeds a person’s yearly carbon budget; one retour flight Amsterdam – Barcelona = ~25% of a person’s yearly carbon budget The carbon budget is the total emissions (not only for business travel!) that an average person can emit yearly to stay below 1.5 degrees global warming.
- Academic researchers are among the highest emitters when it comes to business travel.