9 December 2024
With a growing interest in sustainability in academia, we need to help the biological community embrace these practices within their lab. This is the first of six posts in which I will focus on how to make labs more sustainable. This first post offers an overall picture of academia’s environmental impact.
There is a current focus on environmental aspects of sustainability across all sectors, and the academic sector is no exception to this. Both tertiary education and academia create a substantial carbon footprint and it is our responsibility to manage this now and in the future. Some calculations conclude that they are directly and indirectly responsible for up to 9% of the global carbon footprint. This means that it is more important than ever to find a balance between teaching the next generation, delivering groundbreaking research and finding solutions for the impact our industry has on societal and environmental issues. Although the data has been clear for over two decades, mainstream academia has been slow to respond and adapt its own operations. If we look further than just the carbon footprint and use the criteria set by the Stockholm Resilience Center, we can see that actions are needed on different fronts. These fronts include biodiversity, forever chemicals and land use. There are many things to manage, but where should we start?
As academics, we should stick to what we do best – teaching future generations and preparing them for the challenges ahead. One of the first important steps to take is to include sustainability in all teaching areas and all subjects. This will equip us with the best preparation possible, allowing us to tackle the problems previous generations have created for us. We should also find new ways to teach, educate and inform. It is too late for regrets, so it is vital to keep away from negative narratives and focus on the positives that come from new initiatives.
Academic demographics are also changing in most countries. In most most countries in the Global North overall student numbers are decreasing and academics are having longer careers. To make sure we attract the best people and they are motivated to do research and share their knowledge we ensure young people are included in the decision making instead of end-of-career rectorates, which will help to push academia in the right direction.
We should also redirect our research efforts to mitigate climate change issues. Research has reached a phase requiring more detailed analysis, but this has come at an ecological price. Along with issues such as reproducibility or the overload of publications and falsifications, the environmental footprint of research is currently not included in the selection criteria or decision making for funding, even if experimental research is characterised with a high energy demand and an even greater material footprint. Although academic research should be as free as possible, it should operate within the sustainability boundaries, relying less on raw resources and organising a system that operates within the planetary boundaries. The lack of doing research without sustainability in mind will limit its credibility in the long run and it cannot be ignored even if this looks like a restriction at first.
Furthermore, universities need to implement sustainable actions within their own operations. Decreasing the environmental impact of academia should be the highest priority for all institutes to safeguard future research.
Institutes should start by gathering all data needed regarding their own carbon footprint and material use, as well as impact on biodiversity and other environmental parameters. This first step, which many institutes have already started but is often too fragmented, would allow academics to adapt their infrastructure to the current situation posed by climate change. In often challenging financial situations, this will involve some difficult decisions, but given the state of our climate crisis, research and academia cannot afford to fall behind.
Finally, the biggest channel to leverage change is through funding. Governments and funding bodies should use this power to stimulate sustainable practices and set standards that are transparent and applicable in different fields of science. This would help to measure progress and to inform early-career scientists about the places that adhere to these criteria. Finding and recruiting bright minds is currently challenging and will worsen with reducing student numbers. Thus, sustainability will become an asset in recruitment and this pressure will drive changes.
What is the ideal scenario? Unfortunately, there is no magic one-size-fits-all solution. Every institution going through the process itself is important to implementing lasting changes. The core function of education and research is to make sure that knowledge is not lost by passing it on to future generations in a useable format. Using this definition, projects, curricula and organisations should be analysed and optimised to fulfill these criteria. The current setup of being competitive with a constant pressure to increase academic performance mainly to improve a ranking is not sustainable and often does not align with universities’ missions. Institutes such as Utrecht and Zurich universities have already started to challenge these official university rankings, which do not correspond to their values because they do not take sustainability into account in their scoring systems. The way for education and research to move forward is through embracing critical reflection and analysis of the environmental footprint as well as social impact calculations. In summary, if everyone from education to high-end research does their sustainability homework and includes the environmental footprint in their decision making, we can make academia fit for the future and available for all.
Future posts will cover further detailed actions we can take to make our research more sustainable, starting with our labs and their energy use.
