Help us advance environmentally sustainable research

The Data for Science and Health team at Wellcome has commissioned a report on how the environmental impacts of research are measured and reduced.

We’re looking for interested folks to share insights with us! We want to hear from you if:

📨 You’re working in this space and would be happy to chat

🧫 You’re a Wellcome grant holder and would be interested in taking part in a focus group held by RAND

The ReSus project focuses on the environmental impact of the research we fund. Unfortunately, we don’t have gold standard, accessible ways of measuring the emissions for many types of research, let alone their wider environmental impact. Evidenced practices on how to reduce these negative impacts are also hard to find. This is a problem not just for Wellcome, but for the research sector as a whole.

We’ve already taken some action as an organisation to combat the emissions of our funded work:

Science doesn’t exist in a bubble. The health research we fund has an impact on the environment and can contribute to climate change. So, a degraded ecosystem and a climate in crisis are not environments in which good science, or healthy people, can thrive.

Different types of research will affect the environment in different ways. Wet labs tend to be energy hungry, producing large amounts of plastic and toxic waste. And the social sciences can have large footprints from fieldwork related travel. In big data driven health research, lots of energy is used to store data and train models. Put simply, unsustainable mining practices and e-waste disposal impact the environment throughout the lifecycle of research hardware used daily.

Here are some quick stats to help contextualise the type of impacts we’re talking about:

We also know from engagement work led by our Research Funding team that many scientific researchers are deeply concerned about the environmental impact of their work.

We are hoping to highlight and share tools and methods that can be used across the research sector and contribute to the conversation in this area. And we are also looking to answer questions around how we can best support our researchers to conduct more sustainable research.

RAND have just completed the inception phase of the project. They collaborated with a group of twelve experts across the academic, public and private research sector to help guide their work.

The evidence you provide will be used to help us map out the landscape and understand what is already being done, what can be learnt from and built on, and where the gaps are. This will inform the development of a set of case studies, and further consultation to see what opportunities there may be to take ideas forward or address any gaps in knowledge that might exist, by Wellcome and others. The information that is provided will be used by RAND Europe to prepare a report for Wellcome about environmentally sustainable research.

We’re looking forward to sharing insights along this journey, and connecting with interested researchers, grantees, and individuals working in this space for the next phase!

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