18 August 2025
One of the key missions of universities and research institutes is to educate the future generations of teachers and researchers. Therefore, it is key to integrate sustainability in the ongoing training. Currently, many science curricula lack sustainability. More universities now offer specific sustainability courses, but an integration in all courses has not happened. To integrate sustainability (including environmental, social and financial aspects), a general embedding will be needed.
For motivated students, many sustainability courses exist, from a general understanding to more detailed courses (see list below). However, instead of seeing sustainability as a one-time course or as a separate domain, it is important to change our mindset and embed sustainability in all career stages regardless of field. For instance, we can include sustainability in the selection criteria for new employees or in the onboarding procedure of a new group leader. Repeating and renewing sustainability training will have the biggest impact. Furthermore, some actions that can be taken to structurally integrate sustainability into your organisation are to give people time and resources to develop new protocols, create new ways to communicate sustainability and develop new research projects that combine sustainability with other fields.
Finally, funding bodies and governments can also have a big impact to speed up this transition. Experimental research has one of the biggest footprints per employee and per square meter of lab space; therefore, it is becoming the focus of many funding bodies. For example, UKRI (UK) and DFG (Germany) are including sustainability criteria in some of their funding. Likewise, the: European Research Council (ERC) also encourages sustainability in the Marie Currie Fellowship application process. Other funding bodies like the Flemish FWO have stringent criteria for travel and award prices for sustainable projects. Thus, the funding landscape is quickly adapting and will ensure that sustainability is integrated into projects hopefully not only on paper, but also in daily operations.
The two best known tools used to certify labs as sustainable are LEAF (an assessment framework developed at UCL) and programs at My Green Lab (a non-profit organisation). Although advertised as certification tools, these tools allow you to raise awareness, motivate peers to change and to set concrete, easy to implement changes, which when combined can be an impetus for change. Researchers are trained to be critical thinkers, often to the extreme, and these skills should be used beyond their research area to put into practice strategies that will make research more sustainable. These certification tools should not only be there to initiate this change, but they should be part of a bigger approach to make research more sustainable.
More details about funding opportunities will be in next post. In previous posts, I discuss how to choose more sustainable materials and resources in the lab.
List of institutes that offer sustainability courses:
- EPFL, Switzerland makes sustainability courses mandatory for all its students
- University of Vienna, Austria
- ETH Zürich, Switzerland
- Sustainability courses that are held both in person and online
- Copenhagen University, Denmark
- Broad variety of courses including online Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on all aspects of sustainability (SDGs)
- The Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
- Many courses in German and English on sustainability. See example: BSc Global environmental and sustainability studies
- University of Oxford, UK
- Wageningen University, Netherlands
- Open University
- A variety of environmental and climate related online courses; Climate Change: Transforming your Organisation for Sustainability and Introducing a new free course – Climate Psychology: facing the climate crisis are some examples of such courses
- Green Labs Netherlands
- E-modules on sustainable lab practices
See below other courses or training programmes that are a good starting point:
