EF partnership with myclimate

Pursuing carbon neutrality and teaching students about sustainability

In 2022, we joined forces with myclimate, a nonprofit global leader in carbon accounting and voluntary climate protection projects.

Calculating our carbon impact

Our partnership with myclimate is focused on calculating the carbon footprint of our global business.

Myclimate’s science-based methodologies for calculating emissions are based on the international Greenhouse Gas Protocol and follow the requirements of the Science Based Targets initiative, according to which the carbon footprint must cover all relevant emissions.

While coming to a comprehensive calculation for our global business will take some time, we are committed to doing this because it will allow us to implement more effective and meaningful reduction targets. We also believe that rigorous work upfront will make our long-term goals of transforming our business more attainable.

In the first phase we launched a pilot designed to calculate the carbon emissions of our schools, offices, and all air travel by both customers and staff, based on a sample of representative EF schools and offices, as well as some estimates. The next step of our parentship involves scaling up the carbon accounting to cover our entire global business.

Cornelia Rutishauser, Team Leader for Corporate Partnerships at myclimate, supports EF’s efforts. “To account for all the carbon emissions is a highly technical and incredibly important process,” Cornelia says. “It's so important because it will allow EF to find their carbon hotspots and together come up with an effective and impactful reduction strategy.”

Integrating sustainability into language education

We have also been working with myclimate to develop an environmentally-themed language learning course for our students.

For several years, EF International Language Campuses, our business with 50 campuses around the world, have been exploring ways to leverage our platform as an educator to affect positive change for the environment. Among other things, we have explored ways to incorporate sustainability themes and lessons directly into EF language courses. When we learned myclimate has their own, robust educational

curriculum, we saw a unique opportunity to combine our expertise in language training with their expertise in climate education.

Together, we translated myclimate’s original materials from German to English and tailored the teaching methodology to align with EF’s approach to language learning. The result is a “special interest” course—our term for an elective—now available in all of our English schools. Eventually, we plan to introduce it at all EF language campuses worldwide. Our sustainability courses will eventually be available in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, as well as English.

The course follows a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach, which means the subject matter and language learning are equally important. In this case, students are exploring the science of sustainability while learning how to talk about sustainability in the target language. This is especially valuable for the high school students, university students and young professionals who study with us, because climate fluency is, increasingly, an in-demand career skill.

Stefanie Smith, who is leading the development of the course at EF, envisions a future where the material inspires EF customers and team members from other EF businesses to take meaningful, urgent action. “I hope this course will prompt anyone who comes across it, be that a student or a teacher, to just fight this fight.”