Tools for environmentally sustainable health research: opportunities, challenges and open questions

There many available tools and resources to support research teams to measure, assess and reduce the environmental impacts of their work and facilities. The Sustainable Practice and Research Knowledge Hub (SPARKHub), due to launch soon, will be a single place where research groups can find and access these tools.  

Martin Farley (Associate Director of Environmental Sustainability at UKRI and mind, hand and heart behind SPARKHub) explained how this open-access, free-to-use platform has been designed to enable research groups to assess their environmental sustainability and share case studies of good practice. Through peer-auditing, the platform releases certifications and supports knowledge exchange on sustainable practices across disciplines and institutions. SPARKHub is not only aimed at individual research groups, but it also provides guidance for organisations — such as universities and research institutes — on how to address sustainability in areas like procurement, facilities and governance, reflecting the fact that many of the most impactful decisions sit beyond researchers’ control. 

SPARKHub is an ongoing project and still addressing many questions: whether peer to peer certification is a sustainable method, whether this certification would replace or add to existing environmental sustainability accreditations, whether it could feel like a surveillance system for researchers.  

Joseph Arroway-Myatt (Sustainable Research Practice Coordinator within Oxford’s Environmental Sustainability team) charted the phases in the University of Oxford’s sustainability journey. From wet lab early engagement with the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF)  and voluntary good practice in 2021, towards the current state of large-scale formal compliance (400+ labs certified). The University is now increasingly looking at how to address data-intensive and computational research methods which rely on high-performance computing and extensive data storage. Looking ahead, Joe emphasised Oxford’s ambition to move towards sustainability as a cultural value — something that is routinely considered as part of doing good research, rather than treated as an external requirement. 

In the discussion which followed, Professor Odile Harrison highlighted the tight coupling between sustainability, safety, security and scientific quality that existed in her research into population genomics of bacterial pathogens, noting that regulatory and ethical requirements strictly limit what can be changed, and sustainability initiatives that ignore these constraints risk being experienced as punitive or unrealistic. 

How to balance standardisation and diversity in this field emerged as a question.  Alignment of funders’ requirements and comparability between the outputs of different tools are needed to ensure that environmental sustainability standards and practices are fair and practical across research sectors. At the same time, health research encompasses such different methods, risks and infrastructures that need to be accounted for, limiting standardisation. There was broad agreement that research should not be penalised simply because it is inherently resource-intensive. The aim is not to discourage ambitious or high-impact health research, but to support better-informed choices within unavoidable constraints. 

Tempering this was discussion around how PIs could, in some cases, be made more accountable for the environmental sustainability of their research, as opposed to this labour being delegated to PhD students. In this respect, it is important to distinguish between top-down and bottom-up approaches:  high-level incentives, like funders’ requirements of environmental impact assessments and mitigation, can accelerate action, but local leadership and grassroots engagement remain essential. Rules may prompt behaviour change, but they do not automatically build shared understanding or commitment.  

Across the talks and discussion, a common message emerged from both funder and institutional perspectives: the tools and approaches are works in progress. There were explicit calls for researchers to engage — by feeding back on emerging tools, contributing case studies of good practice, and helping co-design what comes next. Rather than sustainability being “done to” researchers, both Martin and Joe emphasised the importance of it being shaped with them.  Frameworks, platforms and certifications can support change, but their value depends on how they are governed, interpreted and experienced by the research community. The creation of spaces where funders, institutions and researchers can think together — openly — about trade-offs, uncertainties and priorities is crucial.  

This event highlighted the value of an ethics-informed approach that enables diverse communities (researchers, support teams, research organisations, and funders) to explore complex and yet substantial questions. Questions about how to fairly distribute the burden of responsibility for enabling sustainable research. Questions about how to strike a balance between environmentally responsible and scientifically robust health research. Questions about how to tackle tensions in criteria for “good” research practice, such as security, open-access and environmental sustainability. Questions about how to ensure that the drivers towards environmentally sustainable practices are not reduced to strategic compliance and acquisition of certifications, but instead are embedded more fully in the research culture.  

For those of us involved in SHARE, the event underscored the importance of continued dialogue at the intersection of health research, environmental sustainability and digital infrastructures — and of approaches that balance ambition with care, and responsibility with realism.