Interim Report: Complexity, Challenges and Opportunities for Carbon Neutral Digital Research

UK Research and Innovation has placed the net zero transition at the top of its priorities (UK Research & Innovation 2020). This has two implications. Firstly, UKRI supports research which develops and identifies solutions which create advances towards a new net zero world. At the same time, UKRI recognises that its activities and the research it supports have an adverse environmental impact.

As part of its strategy for creating world-class research and innovation infrastructure, UKRI supports a wide variety of digital research infrastructure (DRI). As UKRI notes, “Digital research infrastructure underpins the research and innovation ecosystem and is a critical system for researchers, policymakers and innovators.” Digitally-enabled research and data science open up new avenues for scientific investigation, supported by rapidly expanding streams of sensor, measurement and observational data. This research has a large part to play in enabling the net zero transition.

In order to develop a comprehensive strategy for net zero digital research infrastructure, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), acting on behalf of UKRI, has commissioned a 19 month scoping project (CEDA 2021; UKRI 2022b) to identify all the principal factors which such a strategy should encompass and to ad-vise on the most effective ways forward. This report describes progress made at the mid-point of this scoping study.