Box 4.

Assessing the carbon footprint of neuroscience.

It remains uncertain what truly sustainable research pipelines look like: We need to more clearly identify the footprint of our research. LEAF provides guidance and accreditation for sustainable practices in wet labs, including calculators to estimate the emission reductions achieved, and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping’s (OHBM) Sustainability and Environment Action Group is working on developing a ‘carbon calculator’ (Mariette et al., 2021) and best practice recommendations on open, sustainable pipelines for human neuroimaging research. By developing such tools as a community, we hope it will become much easier to identify those behaviours that most affect our research footprint (how many emissions are saved by skipping an overseas conference, versus moving data to a server that is powered by renewables?) complementing similar calculations for personal carbon footprints (Wynes and Nicholas, 2017). However, community efforts to develop best practice recommendations will only succeed if neuroscientists actively contribute to groups and task forces (join the OHBM team here).