21 March 2025
In the light of climate change, biologists are working together to find a way of running scientific meetings in a more sustainable manner. We are putting a call out to everyone (biologists or not) to share with us their idea that could innovate the way we organise events with a lower environmental impact.
Write an essay of maximum 1000 words to details how your idea will change the way we organise scientific events and will open the door to a new concept of organising events in the next 10 years.
The best ideas will be rewarded. The winning essays will be rewarded with £250 for first prize, £150 for second prize and £100 for third prize. The winning essays will be selected by our Sustainability Committee and will have the opportunity to feature on our website. …
3 February 2025
Doing experiments in a lab setting has many advantages. It allows you to focus on a single aspect without the interference of outside influences. Creating these artificial conditions relies on a range of equipment, from computers to incubators and cooling devices. In addition, biologists, chemists and physicists have learned to hijack biological processes such as DNA amplification (using PCR) and DNA modifications (changing the genetic code using CRISPR). These methods rely on sterile conditions, precise temperature control and pure reagents to work well. Thus, modern research allows for groundbreaking discoveries, but it also requires high-end energy intensive equipment. …
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. …
19 September 2024
My name is Teodora Rinciog and I am the Sustainable Conferencing and Communications Officer at The Company of Biologists. For the past year, I have been working on improving the sustainable strategy of our charitable Workshops and Journal Meetings, whilst also supporting biologists across the world organise their academic events in a more sustainable manner. In this blog, I would like to share with you what I have learnt in the past year about how to organise sustainable academic events and how this will change in the future. While climate change is a familiar term nowadays, it is still hard to imagine how this will tangibly affect our lives in the near future. We were born in the era of consumerism, and it is difficult to imagine that our children will live any differently to us. Yet, the UN has already announced that we could reach the critical 1.5 °C global warming threshold soon. Every action taken from now on counts. …
28 June 2024
We are very proud that The Forest of Biologists has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. This is a great recognition for a project that we have thoroughly enjoyed launching and that we feel makes a true impact to both the scientific community and the natural environment.
26 February 2025
The consumable products in the lab, such as tubes, vials, enzymes and other reagents, are often the major contributor to the lab carbon footprint. For universities that calculate a complete carbon footprint for the entire institute (e.g., Copenhagen University and UCL), lab consumables stand out as one of the major contributing categories. Though an exact carbon footprint of a single product is often lacking (we often do not have enough data for a complete life cycle analysis), there are tools like spend-based methods which can help to get a good overview of the total impact of a single product. …
13 January 2025
Within research labs there are several recognisable appliances which use a considerable amount of energy. These appliances include freezers for storing samples, incubators for optimising growing conditions and ovens for sterilising equipment. Additionally, there are hidden energy-demanding sources, which may often go overlooked. Ventilation systems and accessories, including fume hoods, may use up to 35% of the energy use in a modern lab. The ventilation systems are there to protect the researchers by exchanging the air in the lab every 5 to 8 minutes and to provide perfect experimental conditions that allow for high reproducibility but uses high amounts of energy by constantly moving, heating/cooling and humidification of the air. In addition, operating systems such as computers and servers are required to be constantly on, adding to the energy footprint. …
5 December 2024
We are very excited to welcome Jeroen Dobbelaere as a guest author for this important blog series on how to make our labs more sustainable. …
11 July 2024
It can be problematic to perfectly blend social, environmental and financial goals when organising an academic event, but we think that Chrissy Hammond (University of Bristol) and her co-organisers Lizzie Lawrence, Joanna Moss, Nikki Stevenson and Rabia Sevil rose to the challenge at The Dynamic matrix: mechanics, ageing and repair Conference, a British Society for Matrix Biology (BSMB) meeting. We were delighted to support this event from our Fund for Innovations in Sustainable Conferencing and Scientific Meeting Grants, and we are keen to continue supporting events like this in the future.
We are very grateful to Chrissy for welcoming us at this event. We had the opportunity to talk with the main stakeholders involved in the planning process and we would like to share with you some of the good practices they implemented whilst organising a green meeting. …
11 June 2024
Sustainable practices are often seen as actions that minimise environmental impact. According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the UN, sustainable practices include themes such as environmental protection, the fight against poverty, inclusion, and collaboration.
While many of our blogs explore tips on how to minimise the environmental impact of events, in this blog we will talk about the social aspects of sustainability and how to approach them when organising a conference. …
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