Scientific research is unveiling the secrets of the universe and helping us fight disease, but at the same time, it can be extremely energy intensive. Research laboratories use up to 10 times more energy per square metre than a typical office.

While lab waste and energy usage are known issues for experimental labs that generate data, computational labs that analyse these data are also starting to worry about their energy usage. 

As science increasingly relies on big data and AI tools, the carbon footprint of computational work is on the rise. To control this trend, a coordinated approach is necessary.

A useful framework

A group of scientists, including EMBL-EBI colleagues, have put forward a set of principles for how the computational science community could make its practices more environmentally sustainable. 

GREENER principles

  • Governance
  • Responsibility
  • Estimation
  • Energy and embodied impacts
  • New collaborations
  • Education
  • Research

“We all know that our travel and diet choices affect our carbon footprint. As scientists, we should also be mindful of the silent and unintended environmental consequences of our computational work,” said Loïc Lannelongue, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. “The GREENER principles are a good starting point for understanding and mitigating this impact.”

Build once, reuse many times

Environmentally sustainable computational science is a nascent field with many opportunities. It covers a wide range of topics, from writing efficient code to making data and software tools reusable, so scientists don’t have to spend time and energy on recreating them for each new experiment. 

Take, for example, the AlphaFold software which has been used to calculate over 200 million protein structure predictions. All these predictions are now freely available in the AlphaFold database, jointly developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, meaning that individual labs from all over the world don’t have to spend additional computational resources calculating them over and over again.

A coordinated approach

“The most surprising thing to me is how little research has been done so far in environmentally sustainable computing,” explained Alex Bateman, Team Leader at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). “There are so many opportunities for making computational research more sustainable, but at the moment we’re mostly seeing grassroots initiatives. If we want to see real impact, then researchers, organisations, and funders need to join forces and coordinate efforts.”

Watch a webinar delivered by Loïc Lannelongue about the environmental impact of computational biology.

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