Green Training: What’s the real impact of your events?
As a training coordinator I’m often asked about the impact of our training on people and their ability to achieve their scientific goals. But what about the environmental impact of our events?
By Dr Melissa Burke, Australian BioCommons
As a training coordinator I’m often asked about the impact of our training on people and their ability to achieve their scientific goals. But what about the environmental impact of our events?
The concept of green training was the focus of a dedicated session at this year’s Bioinformatics Education Summit, which brings together a global community of trainers and educators to develop and share guidance and best practice. The session had us discussing factors that contribute to the environmental impact of training, brainstorming green training solutions, and developing ideas for ensuring that green training policies are equitable and fair.
Encouragingly there are already a number of resources and case studies (e.g. ISCB and EMBL environmental policies) that can be used as inspiration when considering your own green training approach. Common strategies for reducing the environmental impact of bioinformatics training events include encouraging the use of sustainable transport, reducing waste and improving compute efficiency are common targets.
A notable theme from the Bioinformatics Education Summit was one of balance and equity. Choosing greener training/compute options requires money and time and can have other societal impacts. The ability to choose green options (whether as an individual or organisation) is dependent on the same factors that influence diversity, equity and inclusion.¹
For example, switching a workshop to virtual mode can seem like a quick win for the environment. It reduces travel, resources needed, and food waste from catering.² But virtual events forgo the benefits of in-person interactions and those joining from far away still face time zone inequities that can have negative impacts on health and wellbeing.²’³
So how do we save the environment while still providing great training experiences for all?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead we keep asking questions, get creative and take it one step at a time.
If you’re looking to reduce the environmental impact of your bioinformatics training events, you and your team can start by asking yourselves the questions posed at the Bioinformatics Education Summit:
What are the sources of impact?
How could this impact be reduced?
What are the challenges/barriers to achieving this goal?
What are the trade-offs?
And a bonus question that I’ll keep asking myself in my professional and personal life after listening to the discussions around equity at the Bioinformatics Education Summit: how can we equitably share this responsibility across the community?
The Bioinformatics Education Summit is an annual meeting that provides a platform for the global training and education network to discuss, develop and share guidance and best practice for training and education in bioinformatics.
Resources and guidance
EMBL
ISCB
Green compute resources
References
1. Jackson, S. Yale Experts Explain Intersectionality and Climate Change. https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-intersectionality-and-climate-change (2022).
2. Wu, J. et al. Virtual meetings promise to eliminate geographical and administrative barriers and increase accessibility, diversity and inclusivity. Nat. Biotechnol. 40, 133–137 (2022).
3. Jasper, S. The effect of time zone disparity on the performance of dispersed innovation teams. (RMIT, 2019).
Collective action removes obstacles in mass spectrometry research
Australian researchers are part of a thriving global effort that collectively works on projects, platforms and services to democratiseaccess to methods in computational MS.
By Dr Johan Gustafsson, Australian BioCommons
When I was a researcher working in mass spectrometry (MS) imaging, learning and effectively implementing computational approaches was fast becoming an unavoidable part of each research project. It was also painful due to the time, effort and confusion involved in self-directed bioinformatics learning (at least for me!), and a noted absence of software designed for the questions we were posing of our data. Fast forward to today and you can add scaling challenges caused by the growth in experimental sample numbers, as well as data complexity and size.
Luckily, Australian researchers are part of a thriving global effort that collectively works on projects, platforms and services that remove this pain by democratising access to methods in computational MS.
Nowhere is this more evident than Galaxy: a point-and-click cloud platform that enables software and workflows to be executed without knowledge of the command line and without worrying about how the underlying infrastructure works. A BoF (birds of a feather) session at the 2023 Galaxy Community Conference provided an opportunity for champions from the US, Europe and Australia to meet and make a renewed effort to connect MS experts across this global community.
We are currently aiming to maximise the size of the community, overcome the tyranny of distance, and accommodate time zone differences, all of which have been major blockers to effective collaboration in the past. The following solutions are also being implemented as part of this Galaxy for MS (G4MS) community.
Dedicated regional champions have been identified, who will regularly meet, and are responsible for further engaging and enriching their regional MS communities
The group is planning activities that directly benefit the global community, including regular community meetings commencing in 2024, a shared software list to harmonise the MS tools available across all public Galaxy servers, and a community page to make the effort visible.
The G4MS community connects experts to support collaboration and knowledge sharing, and seeks to tap into a community voice that can describe the evolving requirements of MS software, data and compute requirements, including how the Galaxy platform can respond. Global collaboration in this way will enable greater access to software and workflows, reduced replication of effort, a convergence on standards, and more time spent on science.
We’ve come a long way. Now it’s time to join the conversation, as part of the Australian computational proteomics and metabolomics communities!
ELIXIR-UK launch BioFAIR
BioFAIR is an exciting new digital research infrastructure that enables the compute resources of ELIXIR and partners to be provided to researchers throughout the UK.
BioFAIR is an exciting new digital research infrastructure that enables the compute resources of ELIXIR and partners to be provided to researchers throughout the UK. Backed by £34M in funding from UK Research & Innovation, BioFAIR will maximise the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability (FAIR) and Reproducibility of life sciences data and workflows. Here at the Australian BioCommons, we can’t wait to work alongside BioFAIR into the future!
The BioCommons’ ongoing partnership with ELIXIR-Europe (since 2020) gave us the chance to share tips and tricks to help the BioFAIR team draft up their proposal. Moving forward, BioFAIR plans to:
“…provide a set of national analysis platforms, in particular a UK Galaxy server and a cloud-based platform like NERC EDS, CyVerse or CLIMB. These general platforms should be complemented by developing dedicated solutions for research communities with an engagement process pioneered by the Australian BioCommons.”
We hope to find lots of opportunities to work with BioFAIR as they implement our engagement process, and are excited for future collaborations working towards our shared aims of enhancing digital life sciences research through providing world class compute resources and infrastructure.
Be sure to follow @BioFAIRUK on X, or find them on Mastodon @BioFAIRUK@mstdn.science, and stay tuned for more exciting updates from them moving forward!