The CNRS has signed the Heidelberg agreement to promote sustainable European research

The medieval town of Heidelberg in the south of Germany is one of the country's main tourist attractions, with its picture-postcard setting along the banks of the Neckar river. The town is well-known for its university which is the oldest in the country having been founded in 1386. However the former capital of the Rhenish Palatinate may now instead become renowned for the historic agreement on the environmental transition of research signed there this year and published in October. 

European-level cooperation

The European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), Europe's leading biology research organisation, is based in Heidelberg and invited around 15 European funding agencies and research organisations to meet there last May to define the foundations for international cooperation on environmental transition. The EMBO has committed to driving the environmental transition of its own activities and to promoting sustainable research practices which the organisation's first 'Lab Sustainability Award' testifies to. However, systemic change of this kind requires the cooperation of all research stakeholders. "That's why the EMBO has chosen to promote international collaboration for sustainability and to encourage funders to actively support sustainability in research" as Philipp Weber, EMBO's Sustainability Officer, explains.

The same is true on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva. Since 1978 the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has been drawing most of its energy from the great lake nearby, finished phasing out the use of fuel oil on its premises in 2022 and has also set up a maintenance workshop to considerably extend the lifespan of its scientific equipment. And yet the EFPL's Vice President for Responsible Transformation, Gisou van der Goot remains adamant that, to achieve such aims, "we will only reach the core of research through research funding agencies." She considers the Heidelberg agreement to be "crucial" in that it could generate a knock-on effect at the European level. "If a single research institution goes through the environmental transition alone it can risk losing competitiveness internationally and necessarily needs to cooperate at other levels", she assures us. Stéphane Guillot is the CNRS's scientific officer for environmental transition and risks and represented France's leading research organisation at the Heidelberg workshop. He agrees with Gisou van der Goot on this point: "An environmental eligibility grid that is common to all European research partners has to be provided so no one is penalised when setting up their projects".

Funding the environmental transition

Susan Simon, the Director of the UK's research funding agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Environmental Sustainability Programme, explains that "funders have leverage to affect change in laboratory practices. The Heidelberg agreement is a statement of intent by key funding agencies to do this without further complicating the approach to funding". In fact, even before the Heidelberg agreement UKRI had already signed the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practices, committing the UK research community to an environmental transition. The agency has already halved its greenhouse gas emissions since 2017, albeit in a favourable national decarbonisation context1 . 

On the French side of the Channel, Stéphane Guillot reminds us that the CNRS's declaration on the next European framework programme proposed that project evaluation criteria should take into account all efforts to reduce a project's environmental impact quantified by the project leader. This 'eco-bonus' supported by the CNRS remains to be integrated into calls for projects by the French National Research Agency (ANR) but France's leading research project funding agency is working towards making this the case. The ANR's director of scientific operations, Dominique Dunon-Bluteau, who also attended EMBO's event in Heidelberg, has noted a significant change since 2020 when the agency he works for asked scientific project leaders making funding applications to specify the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) their projects would contribute to achieving. As he explains, the situation has changed to the extent that "in the 2023 generic call for projects 79% of the projects submitted and 77% of the 1467 selected projects specified at least one of the SDGs compared with 72% and 68% in 2020". The ANR, the CNRS and fourteen other French organisations signed a declaration of commitments introduced as part of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research's climate plan at the beginning of 2024. Now, following on from the Heidelberg agreement, the agency intends "to introduce new specifications for project leaders, the aim being to achieve the best balance possible between research that is effective and sustainable research while controlling costs", according to Mr Dunon-Bluteau.

• 1The UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer reminded COP 29 in early November that the country aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and an 81% reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions compared with 1990 levels by 2035.

Working towards research that is both effective AND sustainable

However, Gisou van der Goot warns against the new addition to these calls for projects: "We don't want sustainability to be a burden or seen as an extra layer of bureaucracy – we want it to help bring about a real change in the way research is done". Philipp Weber also warns against the risk that including this kind of criterion in calls for projects will just be "a superficial 'box-ticking' exercise". Instead, he is calling for "close collaboration between funders and scientists to ensure that the latter have the necessary resources and tools to meet these new standards" and also that in practice these calls for projects should "incentivise resource sharing, reduce resource consumption and stimulate the development of innovative, low-impact research practices". UKRI's Susan Simon is also well aware of these issues, explaining that "the scientists we fund are experts in their field and not necessarily experts in environmental matters. We are working closely with the signatories of the Heidelberg agreement and other partners on a tool that will support scientists in designing their experiments and managing their laboratories or activities in more environmentally sustainable ways. We also see this as the way in which we and other funders can assess how sustainable a research proposal is without being experts in this area".

Following the recent workshop, all eyes are now on the European Research Council (ERC) which attended the Heidelberg event as an observer but not a signatory. However, the ERC's representatives assure us that internal discussions are already ongoing and Gisou van der Goot thinks that "the day the ERC aligns with the position of the national research agencies will mark a major step towards sustainable research". This would be an effective response to the recommendation made by Stéphane Guillot – "If Europe aims to carry on playing a leading world role in innovations like renewable energies, batteries, preserving water resources, innovative buildings and climate risk management, then we need to combine our research efforts because the levels of investment involved are colossal".