Why sustainability in clinical research matters
As the summer temperatures soared across much of the UK, the ISRCTN Registry editors in King’s Cross, London, were thinking about how to champion sustainability in clinical trials and other types of studies.
Sustainability is increasingly becoming a consideration across research, from funders and publishers to research institutions and trial teams. As a registry supporting transparent and responsible research, we are interested in how studies can be designed and conducted in ways that minimise environmental impact without affecting scientific quality.
Springer Nature, which runs the editorial base, has been carbon neutral since 2020 through a combination of actively reducing avoidable emissions and offsetting of unavoidable ones. As a method of compensation, the company partners with the CommuniTree project in Nicaragua, a reforestation initiative certified by Plan Vivo, which certifies community-led forestry and conservation projects.
However, reducing the environmental impact of research requires action beyond publishing organisations. Clinical trials themselves are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon footprint of academic trials, driven by clinical trial unit energy use, patient assessments, and team travel, appears to be lower than that of commercial trials. A recent estimate suggests that the average emissions generated by each participant in a commercial clinical trial would require the carbon absorption equivalent of 3705 trees growing for 40 years to offset*.
These findings highlight the importance of considering emissions at the earliest stages of study design. In this blog, we have a look at our own sustainability and compile practical steps researchers can take to start thinking about the environmental footprint of their studies.
How can using a registry reduce research waste?
One of the main ways in which a registry can help researchers design more sustainable studies is by preventing duplicative and redundant research. ISRCTN aligns with the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, supporting the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse of digital assets. The platform makes study information easy to find through searchable records of standardised identifiers and metadata. These records undergo editorial validation and curation to World Health Organization (WHO) standards, as well as integration with international trial discovery platforms such as the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and NIHR Be Part of research.
By providing a comprehensive record of ongoing and completed studies, registries help spare participants from unnecessary research burdens and enable broader open access to shared data. Prospectively registering a study before recruitment promotes transparency and can help reduce research waste by making planned research visible to the wider community. This allows researchers, funders and policymakers to identify gaps in evidence, avoid unnecessary duplication and make more efficient use of resources. In turn, this strengthens research credibility by helping peers evaluate each other's work, improving reproducibility, and ultimately increasing opportunities for citation and research impact.
Practising what we preach
We began our discussions around sustainability by attempting to understand the footprint of the activities required to run the registry. To explore this concept, we made a simple sustainability calculator to estimate the carbon emissions associated with maintaining the ISRCTN registry†.
Although the ISRCTN Registry is a relatively small operation, our calculator shows that maintaining a research registry still has a measurable environmental footprint. Most emissions arose from staff commuting and homeworking rather than from website infrastructure, highlighting the significant role that day-to-day operational decisions can play in overall sustainability performance.
Importantly, the purpose of this exercise was not to produce a perfect carbon inventory but to start a conversation. By documenting our assumptions, using recognised UK reporting factors and making the model openly available (see footnotes), we hope to demonstrate that sustainability assessments do not need to be complex to be informative. Understanding where emissions arise is often the first step towards identifying opportunities for reduction.
Resources to help make your studies more sustainable
If this blog has prompted you to think about the environmental footprint of your own research, the following resources provide practical guidance on getting started.
A useful introduction to how sustainability is being embedded across the UK Health and Care Research landscape is provided by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) in its Our Commitments to Climate, Health and Sustainability 2024-2026 strategy. As England's largest funder of clinical, public health, social care and translational research, NIHR recognises that health and care research has a key role to play in making healthcare systems more sustainable and resilient to climate change.
The Sustainable Clinical Trials Knowledge Hub is a fountain of reading on sustainable clinical trial specifics for starters and experts alike. A free Clinical Trial Carbon Calculator was launched in 2025 by Sustainable Healthcare Coalition (SHC) after forming the global life-sciences Industry Low Carbon Clinical Trials (iLCCT) Consortium. The calculator helps researchers to estimate the carbon footprint of clinical trials, identify the activities contributing most to emissions and explore opportunities to reduce environmental impacts during study design and delivery. The SHC LinkedIn Community of Practice provides an opportunity to connect with others working to improve the sustainability of clinical research.
As sustainability becomes an increasingly important aspect of responsible research, tools such as these can help researchers take the first steps towards designing studies that are both scientifically rigorous and environmentally conscious.
Final words
Sustainability in clinical research begins long before participant recruitment starts. By prospectively registering studies, reducing unnecessary duplication, sharing data and considering carbon impacts during study design, researchers can make meaningful contributions towards a more sustainable research ecosystem. Registries support these efforts by promoting transparency, reducing research waste and maximising the value of research outputs.
Footnotes
*The source stated that the mean emissions per participant in a commercial trial were 3260 kg tCO2e and the Tree Calculator at Offset Britain was used to understand how many trees would be needed to offset the carbon emissions. The calculator assumes a mature tree sequesters around 22 kg CO₂ per year.
†The ISRCTN estimate uses UK standard methods, combining Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol principles with DEFRA 2026 emission factors. The model captures contributors such as staff commuting, computer use and digital infrastructure, including a proxy estimate of server emissions based on annual website activity (Google Analytics annual page views in the past year of 246,000 and energy-per-page-view assumption of 0.0005 kWh). The calculator is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/AEBSC, and includes the assumptions, data sources and limitations underpinning the calculations.