Sustainable Research Practice Guidance

Purpose

The purpose of the Sustainable Research Practice Guidance is to provide guidance, direction, information and advice to help Researchers identify their responsibilities and to raise awareness of risks and expectations when designing and conducting research. It also aims to highlight the ethical and operational considerations affecting research practices which reflect the University’s wider commitments to environmental sustainability, ensuring that all our research and operations are conducted to the highest standards, in accordance to our environmental sustainability strategy.

Scope

This guidance applies to all Researchers at Warwick when designing and conducting research. This also includes all undergraduate and postgraduate taught and research students when completing assignments and dissertations, or engaging in doctoral and postdoctoral research activities.

Aims

The guidance aims to ensure that environmental sustainability is:

part of, and integrated into, the University’s research strategy and culture, ethics and leadership aspirations
referenced in relevant University R&IS documents
reflected in our actions and decisions shaping research activities
promoted as a key principle underpinning our co-produced or collaborative R&IS activities
driving research infrastructure investments and procurement decisions

Principles

Through designing responsible research, the University is committed to:

Economic Responsibility: Ensuring value for money by considering the full lifecycle costs of research activities, including procurement, maintenance, and disposal. Promote cost-efficiency through resource sharing, collaborative purchasing, and leveraging existing infrastructure, while balancing financial sustainability with research quality and impact.

Social Responsibility: Acknowledging and integrating interconnecting research considerations and opportunities for cross-functional impacts that support the University’s Goals and Values. This includes fostering inter-institutional knowledge sharing, interdisciplinarity, integrity, wellbeing, creativity, and openness.

Environmental Responsibility: Minimising the environmental impacts of Research Practices by:

Reducing energy consumption and water usage.
Considering the impact of local transportation and national/international travel.
Embedding circular economy principles through responsible resource use, maximizing shared resources, and minimizing single-use plastics.
Reducing waste by applying the waste hierarchy.
Protecting ecosystems by addressing local, national, and international biodiversity concerns.
Assessing and mitigating potential environmental impacts from water, ground, and air pollution.
Measuring and reducing direct and indirect carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

Responsibility for implementing this guidance lies with individual researchers, supervisors, principal investigators, research support teams, heads of departments as well as University staff and departments affected by or influential in supporting its ambitions.

Research Life Cycle

Implementation

To illustrate our commitments, we detail key steps and decisions on environmental sustainability to be considered during different stages of the research life cycle. This is an idealised model when such processes are often unstructured and iterative. The document therefore provides general guidance on key considerations regardless of starting point. It is driven by an aspiration for researchers to develop their awareness and understanding of the different ways in which their research may impact on environmental sustainability and encourages action to mitigate the same.

Design

Decisions to ensure and enhance the environmental sustainability of our research require consideration right from the earliest stages of designing research projects.

There is strong recognition at Warwick that sustainability challenges offer direct opportunities for developing cutting edge (discipline specific, inter and transdisciplinary) research, innovation, impact and engagement activities. Such efforts are promoted and supported by the Sustainability SpotlightLink opens in a new window as well as other University and departmental initiatives and networks.

Beyond the focus of research, researchers should increasingly consider the extent to which both the initial process of developing their research ideas, questions and proposals as well as their planned execution can be achieved by reducing impacts on environmental sustainability or may even enhance outcomes and impacts for nature more broadly.

Accordingly, researchers should reflect on opportunities to

Prevent
Mitigate
Restore/regenerate

the impacts across key environmental indicators anticipated from research activities.

Collaboration and partnerships

Researchers are encouraged and supported to seek opportunities to collaborate and to develop partnerships to solve the challenges of delivering environmentally sustainable R&I. Increasingly, there will be an expectation for researchers to work with and learn from the partners they collaborate with.

Supervisors and Principal Investigators are encouraged to advocate for greater inclusion of environmentally sustainable practices in the collaborative and partnership R&I activities they undertake.

Guidance is shared with all researchers and innovators on how to use research infrastructure efficiently as well as on any accredited sustainability programmes [incl. LEAF, Green DiSC and ISO 14001].

Specifically, researchers are encouraged to plan making use of existing infrastructure and facilities, both at Warwick and at other institutions, or explore opportunities for leasing, sharing, and repurposing equipment before buying new.

Increasingly, Researchers should seek and follow accredited environmental sustainability standards and programmes for construction and for sustainable operation of assets and infrastructure (e.g., LEAFLink opens in a new window, BREEAM and other environmental management standards and qualifications).

LEAF at Warwick

Procurement

At the design stage, researchers should also consider the environmental sustainability of the products and services they plan to purchase and thus support the integration of the University’s sustainable procurement efforts. These include but are not limited to the use of laboratories and other facilities, materials, consumables and equipment, IT and electronic equipment, and software processing solutions, as well as the procurement of other goods and services necessary for research.

Researchers and innovators should design projects in ways that proactively incorporate the aims of the waste hierarchy into their materials and equipment choices by preferring prevention and reuse rather than recycling, recovery and disposal.

Such considerations should also be explicitly integrated into project budgeting processes and facilitated by research finance offices.

The University of Warwick Responsible Procurement guidance provides further guidance on legal requirements and emerging best practices at Warwick and beyond. Such considerations should also extend to anticipating how products, materials and equipment could be reused and repurposed across the University and beyond after reaching the end of their use within the research project.

Responsible Procurement Guidance

Precautionary and nature positive principles

Further, researchers are encouraged to anticipate potential side-effects and other unintended consequences caused by their research activities. Such concerns are particularly important in the context of developing novel materials and technologies, or other socio-ecological interventions.

It is acknowledged that researchers are often curiosity-led and therefore anticipating potential impacts can be hard to envisage. By adopting the “precautionary principle” researchers are encouraged to engage in fact finding and stakeholder engagement activities to identify and determine potential ecological and societal implications prior to developing their solutions. Ideally, such considerations should also be integrated into their research design and proposals. A variety of frameworks, tools and resources are available to support Responsible InnovationLink opens in a new window, for both research and business communities.

Where appropriate and consistent with the University’s pledge to becoming a Nature Positive UniversityLink opens in a new window, researchers may also wish to consider embracing an intention to make their research nature positiveLink opens in a new window by incorporating opportunities for developing, trialling, supporting or implementing carbon capture, nature restoration, and other place and nature-based solutions and initiatives as part of the research design.

Data Collection

During the data collection stage involving field work and experiments, researchers should anticipate, consider, plan, avoid and reduce the energy, emissions, waste, water and materials resources implications of their activities. Equally, data collection efforts must not aggravate loss of biodiversity on or off campus.

Efforts in support of greater circularity (both within and outside the project) are desirable.

For on-campus research activities, collaboration with the Estates and Procurement Departments and other sustainability initiatives across the University and beyond are critical for ensuring increased integration of sustainability considerations.

For off-campus field work, the University of Warwick Sustainable Travel guidance provides guidance in form of a travel hierarchy and decision tree that account for different benefits and impacts of virtual vs. in person meetings and engagements. In this context, consideration should also be given to fieldwork and the extent to which this requires in-person vs. online interviews/focus groups. Alternatively, there may be possibilities for outsourcing fieldwork to local agencies and/or other partners abroad.

Sustainable Travel Guidance

Data Analysis

Data analytics are primarily enhanced by the services and solutions offered by the University’s Information & Digital Group (IDG). Where appropriate, researchers should anticipate and manage the energy and emissions implications, particularly for large computations and data storage needs.

The University’s Guidance on AI in Research also commits Researchers to “consider the sustainability of their research in line with the University’s Sustainability principles, taking into account the large amounts of energy and resource required to train and apply AI tools”

Guidance on AI in Research

IDG has WEEE contracts in place and will develop a standard operating procedures or guidance on Environmental Sustainability considerations of electronic and digital waste for its Information Management Policy FrameworkLink opens in a new window.

Where products and services in support of data analysis are obtained from external providers, the University of Warwick Sustainable Procurement guidance (tbc) provides guidance in form of legal requirements and emerging best practices at Warwick and beyond.

Responsible Procurement Guidance

Dissemination

Researchers at the University of Warwick seek to disseminate their findings to a wide range of stakeholders to increase impact and engagement. This stage also covers potential commercialisation of IP.

Wherever possible, researchers should consider the environmental sustainability implications from different modes of engagement, optimising effectiveness and efficiency depending on specific channels and communication needs.

The University of Warwick Sustainable Travel guidance provides guidance in form of a travel hierarchy and decision tree that account for different benefits and impacts of virtual vs. in person meetings and engagements.

Outputs and impact are covered by university-level and departmental reports and submissions to rankings, including QS Sustainability, People & Planet as well as the REF more broadly.