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Perfect. Thank you.

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Okay, so… I assume you can see and hear me okay. I'll make that full screen.

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First of all, sorry for joining late. When I got this thought, I had another session today. So I'm looking forward to seeing the recordings of this. And it's super interesting, this event.

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And thank you very much for the slot to speak. So my name is Martin Farley. I'm the Associate Director of Environmental Sustainability for UKRI.

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And I'm going to talk to you about briefly something that we're working on And I'd really appreciate your feedback. I'll put my email in the chat later on, but it's really to start a discussion around whether this is the right approach.

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In the background, UKRI houses the research councils, including stfc And we have a net zero strategy for 2040. And that focuses on our own estate. There are three councils that have estates within UKRI, STFC, NERC.

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And Medical Research Council doing very different things, but sometimes comparable as well.

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Now, in terms of UKRI, we've been assessing our emissions and what it means to get to net zero, and we have a decarbonization plan for the different states in it.

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It's going to be a challenge, but it's feasible. We can do it.

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And, you know, I'm not here though to necessarily talk about that, but I just want to highlight that we are quite conscious of our missions If we're going to engage the research sector itself to reduce, we have to consider our own emissions as well.

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Now, what I did want to talk about, though, is what we do with the wider research sector.

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Within the UK, you might be familiar with this. This is very focused on the UK, but there's been a Concordat for environmental sustainability of research.

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Essentially an agreement that a lot of research performers And funders will align around improving the system. It sets out six priority areas, which you can see there.

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But I'll let you look it up if you're interested. But I think it's an interesting approach because it says we're going to come together and try to adjust this space.

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And meanwhile, we get a lot of questions as funders, what are we going to do to support this space?

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And I want to highlight that what I'm going to mention is partially semi-focused on health, but other forms of research. But that's the question I have for you today around this approach towards areas like physics.

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In the UK, Cancer Research UK and Wellcome Trust have put out environmental sustainability policies in their funding mechanisms.

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They're asking organizations to become signatories in Cordat, as well as promoting green lab accreditations and the DFG in Germany has put out sustainability guides and it's more engaging applicants to consider sustainability in this There's discussions of funders between networks right now around how do we engage the sector

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In a collaborative and constructive way to promote environmental sustainability in science, as well as all research forms.

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And I think obviously I'm focused more on science today for today's audience, but it's just that that's the question I have.

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And I want to share an approach that we've had now.

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In the background, one of the things we've done, and I haven't mapped physics on here, this was done a while ago and this is not an exhaustive list.

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But the point I want to make with this slide is that there's a lot of different initiatives going on for different research activities to make them more environmentally sustainable.

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Sometimes there's quantification and actually Lebanon Sank have done a lot around quantifying the emissions of research. If you haven't come across them. I'm guessing you have if you're here today because they've done some work in your area as well.

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But there's a lot of good work out there. And one of the the thoughts that we had is how do we bring this together?

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Some people are doing high energy physics. But some people are doing some people are doing are crossing over between matters. Some people are doing biophysics some people are doing chemistry between biology labs are traveling. Some people are doing field work. You were talking about travel just now.

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And there's a thought that if there's a lot of different sources for environmental sustainability guidance, can we bring this together a bit to make it easier for the research sector to access?

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We also want to make sure that there are common ways of assessing the emissions of research activities. And I think Hannah is doing a lot of good work in this space and has done But we're also conscious that we don't want there to be financial barriers to access what good looks like.

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And we need appropriate governance to ensure that what good looks like in the future evolves.

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And so right now, at least there's a thought that um We don't know exactly how to integrate sustainability within our funding mechanisms.

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We also can't ask open questions we don't assess. And that's particular to UKRI, but we don't want to add administration and bureaucracy to how we fund research.

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What we're working on now is what we've called the sustainable practice and research knowledge hub and that's what I just want to share with you.

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The idea is that it can provide certification for research activities. And I appreciate that what you're doing is very is highly specified.

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It might be less that it lends itself to a certification, but I still want you to think about that approach.

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But the idea is that it can provide certifications for different research activities to reflect the multitude of activities that different researchers do. So it'll be a bit flexible if you're doing XYZ, then you get specific guidance on XYZ as opposed to ABC, you know, and it it can

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With some standard actions in the background, which will be developed by academics that we engage.

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And so we want to engage the academic sector to produce what good looks like.

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Make it open access and have a certification method that allows people to get a stamp to say good job.

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And that's important because that's important because Well, it's good to validate people's efforts, but also it's good from a funder's perspective that we can see that people have participated in a process to recognize it potentially in funding mechanisms down the line.

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So that's the process that we're approaching. The idea is that it would be a free open access platform.

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But with some push for people to take it up. And it could house things like calculators, training, and certification.

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We're in the process of developing it now. And we're engaging other research funders mostly around Europe, but some outside around trying to collaborate in this space together because we need a common idea of what good looks like.

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If we're going to, it's already complicated to apply for funding. We can't have 10 different ideas of what good looks like in sustainability between 10 funders.

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So a lot of benefits to this approach, we think. I won't go through them all, but I think there's transparency and a common idea of good and scalability and avoids duplication and cost efficiency for coming together.

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And working collaboratively in this space. What have we done? We've run a ton of workshops and mostly we haven't engaged yet with your specialist area. So I really appreciate the slot today.

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I would love feedback and you don't have to give it to me today, but again, I'll put my email in here.

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If we want to run a workshop with physicists, that would be great.

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To understand, can this be useful? If it's not useful, can we make it useful?

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Or is this not appropriate for your domains? But we've started building this website. We want to start a pilot of it later in this fall.

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And we're looking to do this around Europe. And that's really the question I have for you is, does this sound like a helpful idea for physics?

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For what you do. And I understand that that's a broad tent as well But we just want to support more environmentally sustainable research in the future. So your feedback is very welcome We want to get it right. So I'll stop there, but I'll put my email in the chat and would appreciate any feedback if anybody has any. But thank you very much for the

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The time.

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And we're welcome to all the questions that you might have on the topic.

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Very interesting one, I could say.

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Any questions, hence?

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I'll take the silences as i'll take the silence overwhelming support for this approach.

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But it's also very interesting and kind of new I don't know. I haven't seen such an initiative before. How would you actually see like large scale infrastructure like those in high energy physics engage with initiatives such like the spark one

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I've lost one of your questions, but how would you picture it?

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I would suggest that anybody who's interested is that we run a little workshop. What I will say is that we would imagine that there's two tiers of guidance. One would be focused at group level, so activities that you can do on a day to day, and one would be more at organizational infrastructure level.

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And I say this because when we think about the way research groups function in other domains, be it life science or chemistry.

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Is that there's a lot that the group level can do, but actually they need the organization infrastructure to meet them sort of in between in ensuring that there's a sustainable research ecosystem.

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I would imagine we run some workshops and we start to look at mapping what good looks like in that space.

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And you would say that also like the spark initiative would provide all the help with regards to the calculations and the you know for example doing a lifecycle assessment project.

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And… One of the things we're trying to do is look at supporting developing some of the Labour and Francine calculators to be applied outside of France.

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But we're not we're not solving everything as well. I think some of the work that Hannah and others has done is probably more appropriate to to this in my limited understanding, I don't want to speak for her either but um uh

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Okay. Duane, I'm also ready to send anything?

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Yeah.

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Yeah, it was just a very… So one of the things about sustainability and at least as someone who provides money for funding research is that like some people don't want to see as like a tack on. I've seen a lot of people

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Slate dei sections of slate of applications for research because it feels like it's tacked on and they're asking for specific things so I guess what we need to, at least from stfc and those funders is a commitment to that they're taking sustainability seriously and

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Something where we can the submission framework really has sustainability grounded into the entire concept, not just here's what the science is at the end, how is it sustainable

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It's a really good point. And I say this, you know, my background's more in life sciences, but I think, uh.

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What I have seen is that research quality aligns quite often with environmental sustainability approaches. So I think there is this alignment that and it's beneficial to embed it within that We didn't call this an outright sustainability or green website because actually we wanted this to not necessarily just

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Be thought of as a green add-on. And that's, you know.

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The idea of there's a debate. Do we call this the greener research hub or do we call it Spark?

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And part of that was the debate of how do we frame this? So it's a very good point, Dwayne, and I appreciate that.

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Okay. Thank you, Hartin. Maybe we'll also have the chance to talk about this in a future workshop.

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For now, since