Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A grant proposal includes a climate impact statement estimating tonnes of CO2e over three years, with specific mitigation commitments.
- Is an instance
A DMP appendix attaches a compute-carbon calculator estimate to evidence its computing footprint claim.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A boilerplate statement copied without numbers is non-compliant in most funder schemes.
- Not an instance
An after-the-fact carbon footprint at project end is reporting, not a forward-looking impact statement.
Editorial commentary
A climate impact statement is a structured section within a data management plan or full research proposal that estimates and discusses the environmental impact of the planned research activity — typically covering travel, computing, laboratory energy use, procurement of consumables and equipment, and data storage — and states what the applicant will do to mitigate it. It is emerging as a standard companion to the ethics, EDI and data-management sections of a proposal, following the same logic: funders increasingly want the environmental cost of a project made explicit and planned for up front, not discovered after the fact.
What a credible statement contains
The stronger versions of this section quantify rather than gesture: an estimated tonnage of CO2e over the project lifetime, often broken down by category so the largest contributor is visible, and specific, checkable mitigation commitments tied to it — choosing a lower-carbon grid region for HPC allocation, capping long-haul conference travel and substituting regional or virtual attendance where practical, or specifying reusable rather than single-use consumables in the procurement plan. Some proposals attach supporting evidence, such as an output from a compute-carbon calculator, backing the estimate.
Funder practice
Wellcome’s environmental sustainability policy is a commonly cited reference template for structuring this section, and a cross-sector Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice, hosted by Wellcome with UKRI among its signatories, has pushed UK funders and institutions toward embedding sustainability planning, including statements of this kind, into standard research practice. See climate-aware funding for how these requirements sit within broader funder policy, and ERC Data Management Plans under Horizon Europe for a specific funder’s DMP structure this section can sit within.
What doesn’t qualify
A boilerplate paragraph reused across proposals without project-specific numbers typically fails review under funders that score this section; a footprint reported only after project completion is an outcomes report, not a climate impact statement, which is by definition a forward-looking planning document.
References
- Wellcome environmental sustainability policy; Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice.
Also known as
Environmental impact statement (research) · Sustainability statement (grant)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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