Speaker
Description
High performance computing health research is implicated in a range of harmful environmental impacts such as energy, water and other resource consumption and waste generation. Numerous tools have been developed - mainly in High income countries- to enable and encourage researchers to assess and reduce these impacts, including guidelines, carbon calculators, and laboratory certification systems. As these tools begin to be rolled out across the wider more global research ecosystem, it is important to explore potential and emerging ethical, social and practical issues. These include tensions with local values when tools are used in different geographical contexts, issues of inequity and injustice and the risks of compliance-based approaches in this field. In this talk, we will present initial findings of a multi-country project aiming at assessing the ethical, social and practical implications of using tools in health research sites in five countries across four continents (UK, India, Ghana, Kenya and Brazil). We will present our study design, including how we developed an approach to compare large qualitative data sets across countries, as well as preliminary themes around meanings of environment, environmental citizenship, communities of practice, and the importance of context.