Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A department's annual sustainability report quantifying laboratory energy use, conference travel emissions, and single-use plastic procurement.
- Is an instance
A PI completing a My Green Lab certification self-assessment for their laboratory.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A funder impact statement describing how a project's research findings inform conservation policy — a different, outcomes-of-research-findings sense of 'environmental impact.'
- Not an instance
A UK REF impact case study documenting external benefit of research — a separate research-assessment framework, not an operational-footprint concept.
Editorial commentary
This page covers the environmental impact of doing research — the operational footprint that laboratories, fieldwork, computing, and research travel generate (energy and water use, waste, emissions, procurement) — which is the sense research administrators, lab managers, and institutional sustainability offices most often need. It is not about a research project’s findings contributing to environmental outcomes such as conservation or climate-policy evidence (a distinct, funder-impact-statement sense), and it is not the UK REF’s specific “impact” case-study concept, which concerns any documented external benefit of research (economic, social, cultural, or environmental) and is a separate assessment framework entirely.
What the operational footprint actually covers
Research activity generates environmental impact across several distinct categories, each of which is tracked and reduced somewhat differently:
- Energy and emissions — laboratory equipment (fume hoods, ultra-low-temperature freezers, autoclaves), high-performance computing, and building HVAC are disproportionately energy-intensive relative to typical office space; a research carbon footprint assessment quantifies this alongside travel and procurement.
- Travel — conference and fieldwork travel, particularly long-haul air travel, is frequently the single largest controllable emissions source for a research group or department.
- Procurement and waste — single-use plastics, chemical and biological waste disposal, and equipment lifecycle (manufacture, energy use in operation, and disposal) all carry an environmental cost beyond the immediate purchase price.
- Water use — particularly relevant to wet-lab and life-sciences facilities running continuous cooling or washing equipment.
Emissions scope framing
Institutional sustainability reporting typically follows a scope 1/2/3 framework: direct emissions from institution-owned sources (scope 1), purchased electricity/heat (scope 2), and the far larger and harder-to-measure category of everything else in the value chain — including staff and student travel, procured goods and services, and commuting (scope 3). Research activity specifically tends to sit heavily in scope 3, which is why institution-wide sustainability targets often struggle to capture research-specific footprint without a dedicated accounting exercise.
Institutional and lab-level frameworks
Several established frameworks exist specifically to help a lab or institution assess and reduce this footprint: My Green Lab certification assesses individual laboratory practices against a published standard, and the LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework) provides a structured, points-based self-assessment originally developed at UCL. Practical guidance on reducing footprint at the bench and facility level is covered in CASRAI’s guides on lab sustainability and sustainable lab practices.
Why this matters to a research office
Funders increasingly ask for environmental-impact information as part of an application or a data management plan (some funder templates now include a climate-impact-statement field), and institutional sustainability targets (net-zero commitments, scope 3 reporting obligations) increasingly require research-specific data that general estate-level energy figures don’t provide. A research office that can point a PI or department to a concrete framework (My Green Lab, LEAF) and to CASRAI’s carbon-footprint and travel-emissions terminology is better placed to respond to both funder questions and internal sustainability reporting requests than one relying on informal, ad hoc estimates.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the same as REF “impact”?
No. UK REF impact concerns any documented external benefit of research (which can include environmental benefit among many other types) and is assessed through impact case studies as part of research evaluation. This page is about the environmental cost/footprint that the research activity itself generates, an operational and sustainability-reporting concept, not a research-assessment one.
What is the biggest controllable source of research-related environmental impact?
It varies by discipline and facility type, but air travel for conferences and fieldwork, and energy-intensive laboratory equipment run continuously (freezers, fume hoods, autoclaves), are the two categories most commonly identified as the largest controllable contributors in institutional sustainability assessments.
Do funders require an environmental-impact statement?
Requirements vary by funder and are evolving; some funder data-management-plan templates and application forms now include an optional or required climate/environmental-impact field, but there is no single universal requirement across funders.
References
- My Green Lab certification programme documentation.
- LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework), University College London.
Also known as
Environmental impact of research
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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