Sarah Grimshaw, Chair of our staff Green Team, blogs about attending a workshop on supporting sustainable research and highlights work already taking place at the HRA and elsewhere to encourage change.
Last year I blogged about two events I attended on how to support green research and reduce its impact on the climate and the environment. I was struck by how much individual organisations have done to reduce the impact of their research on the environment, and that we needed to work together more closely to bring about system-wide change that will drive behaviours.
A year has passed since then, and while progress has been slow, due to the complexity of the challenge, there is still lots of passion and commitment from the research community for change.
This was very much evident at a workshop I attended in June, funded by Innovate UK and run by members of the MRC-NIHR Trials Methodology Research Partnership Greener Trials Working Group. I was very pleased to represent the HRA at the workshop, which was held to share knowledge between regulators, funders, publishers and researchers about how to make research more environmentally sustainable. The focus was very much on the role that these bodies could have in shaping this change.
There were lots of ideas about how to ensure that research is environmentally sustainable whilst also acknowledging that capacity and knowledge within the sector would be key to driving change. The organisers of the event will be publishing a report later this year with five key recommendations about what we can do as a sector, so I’ll make sure to look out for that and see how the HRA could contribute in the future.
The HRA has an important role to play in encouraging sustainable research but as a public sector organisation with limited resources we also need to think carefully about what support we can realistically provide. Thankfully we already provide lots of useful guidance, support and recommendations. For example, we encourage researchers to:
- register research on a public database and publish the results to avoid the research being repeated
- involve patients and the public in developing research proposals to help design a research project with just the right amount of research activity in just the right places and ways so that the results are more meaningful to the people the research is for and about
- consider setting up research so that participants can attend appointments locally instead of travelling further afield
Other organisations and individuals are starting to develop their own guidance and guidelines in their own fields. Earlier this year, researchers published a toolkit on carbon footprinting clinical trials in an open access journal so that others can start applying these principles to their own research. The NIHR has published carbon reduction guidelines, and UK Research and Innovation has released their concordat on the environmental sustainability of research and innovation practices which organisations can sign up to.
There is clearly a will; now we just need to find the way to work together.