Help us advance environmentally sustainable research

The Research Sustainability (ReSus) Project

Key details

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

RAND Europe, who are conducting the research, will identify the tools and methods currently being used, map out how Wellcome could integrate them into our work, and highlight key gaps in the space.

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

Please feel free to reach out to t.caplan@wellcome.org for more information.

What is the ReSus project?

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.

Why now?

Our focus on Climate and Health increases the need for Wellcome to be an informed leader in this area. Unless we can find ways to make the science we fund more sustainable, we’ll continue to be part of the problem.

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

• Training on sustainable research practices is an allowable cost Under Wellcome’s Continued Professional Development policy.
• As a part of our carbon offset travel policy, we expect grantees to minimise travel, choose the lowest carbon option when feasible and offset the emissions for the journeys they do make. Also, all organisations applying for Wellcome funding must have or be developing policies and procedures to help employees measure the carbon impact of the travel they need to take.

The environmental impact of science

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:

• In 2021, clinical trials globally were estimated to equal around half the national emissions of Denmark, a country of 5.85 million people. That’s 27.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to be exact.
• The natural language processing model GPT-3 developed by OpenAI produced 552 tons of Co2e to train* alone. That’s the equivalent of roughly 308 direct flights from London to Sydney. This type of large computation is becoming increasingly common in health research, see the Crick’s most recent collaboration with DeepMind for more information on this.

*training a model is the process through which, by using existing data, it learns how to do what it was built for. Here’s an example video to help get your head around this concept.

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.

ReSus to the rescue!

The Research Sustainability (ReSus) project was designed as an attempt to fill these knowledge gaps. So, we’ve commissioned RAND Europe to conduct a knowledge gathering exercise.

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.

A note on scope

A decision was made early on to focus not just on CO2 emissions, but on the wider environmental impacts of health research, like harmful waste disposal practices. Doing this allows us to target more of the negative impacts harming marginalised communities. For example, the detrimental health consequences that result from unsustainable waste disposal particularly effect individuals in low- and middle-income countries, where waste from the global north is typically exported to.

It’s an exciting time ahead

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.

As a next step, RAND is conducting a crowdsourcing exercise to collect examples of practice that reduce or measure the environmental impact of health research. If you are interested in participating, please email sustainablehealthresearch@randeurope.org

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!