Creative Acts

http://www.keep.loesje.org/

Young people are traveling through Europe every day to gain great experiences such as participating in an intercultural exchange, doing a voluntary or Erasmus year abroad. This is good and fun and we should keep on doing this.

The distance of traveling can be rather far and sitting in a bus for 24 hours isn't ideal and the cheapest way of transport is in many cases by plane.

A negative side effect of this is as we know that planes are rather polluting and contribute to the Greenhouse effect. To compensate these greenhouse gases there is something very easy that can be done besides not flying, namely planting trees. Not you personally but there are companies and NGO's that organise that.

All these opportunities of traveling are financed by grants from the European Commission. What Loesje wants to reach is that these compensation cost for the greenhouse gases will be part of the travel expenses in grant applications. So when you apply for a grant and when you get it that money directly goes to planting trees as compensating for the pollution that your project will give.

There are agreements inside the EU that we should fight the Greenhouse effect and lower the CO2 concentration. In that way this suggestion to the European Commission isn't something controversial but suits the existing policies perfectly.

As individuals but also as NGO's we have a responsibility, so why not take it when it doesn't take so much effort?