Transportation and meeting activites

Purpose

One of DTU’s goals is to be a driving force for sustainable value creation in Denmark and globally. As part of this objective, DTU is working to ensure a sustainable transformation of the University’s own operations and administration.

An important focus area for DTU’s sustainable transformation is the employees’ and students’ transportation and meeting activities because:

• Work-related and study-related transportation contributes a large and growing share of DTU’s total CO₂ emissions.

• DTU wants to lead by example in the realization of the opportunities offered by digitalization. Promotion of virtual meeting and teaching activities is in line with this, and constitutes a means of reducing DTU’s transport-related CO₂ emissions.

Attitude

As an internationally oriented elite university, DTU prioritizes further developing and increasing the University’s global collaborations, partnerships, and activities. DTU believes that the competences we acquire and the results created in the meeting between people and across academic competency and geography are useful and necessary to develop the world in a more sustainable direction.

DTU is a physical university and believes that the physical meeting supplemented by virtual presence, experimental teaching, and face-to-face dialogue are essential to the students’ and employees’ learning, work, and well-being.

DTU’s activities require a conscious and continuous weighing of how the University’s meeting, teaching, and transportation needs best support DTU’s objective of creating “sustainable order in your own house”. An objective which is both to promote sustainable working life and the environmental dimension of sustainability.

Follow-up

DTU’s sub-policy on transportation and meeting activity reflects the attitude that the University must be able to document a reduction in our air transport-related CO₂ footprint each year, and promote access to means of transportation and meeting activities that leave the smallest possible CO₂ footprint.

Each year, all DTU units must translate DTU’s objectives for transport and meeting activity into target figures that are integrated into DTU’s annual cycle and form part of the organizational dialogue with the Executive Board.

Responsibility and scope

DTU’s Executive Board sets the framework for DTU’s overall sustainability initiatives aimed at ‘putting your own house in order”. The Director is responsible for ensuring that DTU’s units work locally to integrate the attitude to transportation and meeting activity in the DTU culture.

Commencement

DTU’s sub-policy on transportation and meeting activity was approved by the Executive Board on 2 September and discussed by the Cooperation and Joint Consultation Committee in September 2020. The policy becomes effective when published on DTU Inside.