Research has begun to ask a question it long avoided: what does it cost the planet to do? Laboratories are among the most energy- and resource-intensive spaces on any university estate — a single ultra-low-temperature freezer can use as much electricity as a household — and the conduct of research generates emissions through equipment, consumables, computing, and travel. A practical movement has grown up to measure and reduce that footprint, and it now has recognised frameworks and certifications. This article surveys them, drawing on the sustainable-research domain.
The accounting frame: scopes 1, 2 and 3
Sustainable research starts, like all carbon work, with measurement, and the standard frame is the three scopes of greenhouse-gas accounting applied to research operations.
- Scope 1 emissions are direct: those from sources the institution owns or controls — on-site combustion, certain laboratory gases.
- Scope 2 emissions are indirect, from purchased energy: the electricity that runs the freezers, fume hoods, and instruments.
- Scope 3 emissions are the wider indirect footprint: the embodied carbon in equipment and consumables, the emissions of suppliers, and — significantly for research — staff and conference travel.
The reason this frame matters is that it locates the footprint honestly. For many research operations the largest single contributions are scope 2 energy (especially cold storage) and scope 3 travel and procurement. A carbon footprint of a research project that counts only the obvious on-site emissions and ignores the embodied carbon of equipment or the flights to a conference is not a footprint; it is a flattering fragment.
LEAF: the framework built for labs
Knowing the scopes is one thing; giving a working scientist concrete actions is another, and that is what LEAF — the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework — provides. Developed at University College London and now used by laboratories across many institutions, LEAF is a standards-and-actions framework that a lab works through to earn certification at Bronze, Silver, or Gold level.
What makes LEAF effective is that it is specific and bottom-up. Rather than a high-level pledge, it gives a lab a checklist of concrete practices: ULT freezer optimisation (running freezers at -70°C rather than -80°C where the science allows, and maintaining them properly), fume-hood sash management (closing the sash to cut energy use), an equipment hibernation policy for powering down idle instruments, sample-storage rationalisation, and plastic reduction to cut single-use plastic, the dominant material burden of many wet labs. Each action is small; the aggregate across a research-intensive institution is not. LEAF also builds in a calculator so that a lab can estimate the financial and carbon savings of its changes, which turns sustainability from exhortation into measured outcome.
My Green Lab: certification and the supply chain
Running in parallel, and increasingly international, is My Green Lab, a non-profit whose My Green Lab certification assesses laboratory sustainability across a wider band of levels, from Bronze through to Platinum. My Green Lab covers similar operational ground to LEAF — energy, water, waste, procurement — but it has been particularly influential on the supply side, through its work rating the environmental impact of laboratory products and equipment. That matters because a great deal of a lab’s footprint is scope 3, embodied in the things it buys, and shifting procurement toward lower-impact products is one of the higher-leverage moves available. The two frameworks are not rivals so much as complementary entry points; many institutions encourage one or the other, and some use both.
The parts a certification can miss
An honest account has to note where the easy wins run out. Two contributions to the research footprint sit awkwardly inside lab-focused certifications and deserve naming in their own right.
The first is research travel. Flight emissions from conference and fieldwork travel are, for many researchers, the single largest component of their professional carbon footprint, and they fall under scope 3 rather than under anything a bench checklist controls. Conference-travel decarbonisation — virtual and hybrid formats, regional hubs, train-first policies — is a cultural change at the level of the discipline and the funder, not the individual lab.
The second is compute. Compute energy consumption, and in particular the carbon cost of training large AI models, is a fast-growing and often-invisible part of the research footprint. A computation’s energy and carbon can be measured and recorded — the same energy consumption record and carbon emissions estimate that belong in a reproducibility package double as sustainability data — and carbon-aware scheduling can shift heavy jobs to times and places where the grid is cleaner. None of this is captured by a freezer-and-fume-hood certification, which is precisely why the footprint has to be accounted across all three scopes rather than within the lab walls alone.
A laboratory can earn a Gold certification for its bench practice and still have a large footprint dominated by flights and GPU-hours. Sustainable research means accounting for the whole footprint, then reducing the largest parts first — not optimising the parts that are easiest to see.
Reduction first, offsetting last
A consistent principle runs through credible sustainable-research practice: reduce before you offset. A carbon offset is widely treated as a last resort after genuine reduction, not a substitute for it, and a serious net-zero research commitment is one backed by measured reductions across the scopes rather than by purchased credits. The frameworks reflect this ordering: LEAF and My Green Lab are about cutting consumption, not buying absolution.
Where shared vocabulary fits
Sustainability reporting in research is bedevilled by inconsistent terms — what counts in which scope, what a “green lab” certification actually attests, how a compute carbon estimate is calculated. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms and points back to LEAF and My Green Lab for the certifications and to the GHG Protocol for the scopes is what lets institutions compare footprints and funders set meaningful conditions. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.
What to do now
For labs: pursue LEAF or My Green Lab certification, and start with cold storage, which is usually the biggest single energy line. For researchers and funders: account for travel and compute, the scope 3 parts a bench checklist misses, and decarbonise the largest of them first. For standards work: align sustainability vocabulary on the GHG scopes and the recognised certifications so footprints are comparable and net-zero claims are checkable.
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