UK Research and Innovation
Building the Sustainable Research Methods Hub: A Secure, Open-Access Platform for Environmental Best Practice
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Background
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), supported by UK Shared Business Services (UK SBS), is the UK’s largest public research funder, working with institutions across disciplines ranging from life sciences and social sciences to engineering and chemistry. As the environmental impact of research activities came under greater scrutiny, UKRI recognised the need for a sector-wide shift towards more sustainable practices.
However, the sector lacked a unified, open-access system for guiding, implementing, and reporting on sustainability actions. Existing solutions were fragmented, non-transparent, costly, or too narrowly focused on specific disciplines such as laboratory sciences. This created inconsistency across institutions, limited adoption, and made it difficult for funders to assess sustainability performance reliably.
To address this challenge, UKRI commissioned UK SBS to deliver a Sustainable Research Methods Hub: an open, centralised digital platform to standardise sustainability practices, enable certification, and support compliance with international environmental standards.
The Need
The vision was to create a platform that could serve researchers, institutions, funders, reviewers, and even the public. The system needed to address several critical challenges:
- Fragmented practices — Researchers relied on disparate tools and local spreadsheets, with no common framework or quality control.
- Lack of standardisation — Sustainability reporting varied across disciplines, making benchmarking and comparison impossible.
- Limited transparency — Existing tools often lacked openness, undermining trust and limiting adoption.
- Compliance pressure — Institutions struggled to demonstrate alignment with sustainability frameworks such as the GHG Protocol or ESG standards.
- User diversity — The platform had to serve a wide spectrum of users, from individual researchers to institutional administrators, funders, auditors, and the general public.
Beyond these challenges, UKRI needed a secure, scalable solution that complied with GDPR, ISO standards, and WCAG 2.2 accessibility requirements. It also had to be open-access, flexible enough to grow internationally, and robust enough to handle tens of thousands of users.
The Solution
Working in close collaboration with UKRI’s Associate Director of Environmental Sustainability and programme leads, UK SBS partnered with 6B to design and deliver the Sustainable Research Methods Hub, a secure, cloud-hosted platform built in Laravel. The system was designed to bring together multiple functions into a single, unified digital environment, providing researchers, institutions, funders, reviewers, and the public with a trusted space to access, implement, and report on sustainability practices.
At the core of the platform are tailored sustainability actions aligned to different research activities such as wet labs, data centres, or fieldwork. These actions are categorised into Bronze, Silver, and Gold certification levels, helping research groups benchmark and progress their sustainability efforts. A comprehensive certification and auditing framework supports this process: research groups are automatically matched with peers for impartial review, while designated reviewers provide additional oversight to ensure consistency and integrity. Upon successful completion, digital certificates are generated, complete with customisable branding to reflect institutional or funder identity.
Institutional administrators benefit from powerful dashboards that provide real-time insights into sustainability performance across their research groups. Metrics on energy use, carbon emissions, waste reduction, and compliance progress can be visualised and exported, supporting both internal strategy and external reporting obligations. Alongside this, a resource hub provides a central repository of best-practice guides, training materials, and policies, all supported by version control, tagging, and advanced search to encourage knowledge sharing.
The platform also introduces comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities for funders and policymakers, enabling them to track adoption rates, benchmark progress, and make evidence-based decisions about future funding. Designed with extensibility in mind, the Laravel architecture ensures the system can easily support additional modules such as carbon calculators, environmental impact estimation tools, or new multilingual content as they are developed in future phases.
Security and compliance were built into the platform from the ground up. The system meets GDPR requirements, aligns with ISO 27001 standards, and achieves WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility compliance. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and every action is logged to provide a clear audit trail. By following agile delivery practices, including user-centred design, iterative prototyping, and stakeholder testing, the development team ensured the hub was intuitive, secure, and aligned with the real needs of its diverse user base.
The Impact
The deployment of the Sustainable Research Methods Hub has delivered a step-change in how environmental sustainability is embedded across the research sector. For researchers, the platform provides clear, tailored actions and an accessible certification pathway, making it easier to implement best practices and gain recognition for their efforts. The peer-auditing model not only validates sustainability achievements but also fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange between groups, encouraging consistent adoption across disciplines.
Institutions now benefit from greater visibility of their sustainability performance. Real-time dashboards and analytics enable administrators to monitor progress, identify gaps, and align institutional strategies with both national and international environmental targets. Compliance with frameworks such as the GHG Protocol is easier to demonstrate, reducing reporting overheads and enhancing institutional sustainability profiles.
For funders, the platform offers unprecedented transparency. Certification processes and auditing provide robust, verifiable evidence of sustainability, helping funders ensure that grants and investments align with environmental responsibility. This transparency strengthens trust across stakeholders and positions UKRI as a leader in sustainable funding practices.
The general public and wider research community also benefit through open access to resources, guides, and case studies. This increases transparency, promotes best practice, and contributes to sector-wide accountability. By consolidating disparate efforts into a single secure platform, the hub reduces duplication of effort, lowers administrative overhead, and creates a scalable model for international expansion.
More than just a technology project, the Sustainable Research Methods Hub represents a sector-wide transformation. Built on a robust Laravel foundation, it provides the research community with a trusted digital ecosystem that standardises sustainability practices, supports compliance, and fosters collaboration. In doing so, it positions the UK as a global leader in embedding environmental stewardship into the research lifecycle and sets the stage for long-term, scalable impact.