UNH Today

Innovations developed by scientists at the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES), like the Agricultural Experiment Stations in 49 other states and U.S. territories, are essential to ensuring that the U.S. food supply chain—from producer to consumer—is abundant, safe and accessible to all communities. In 2021, over 6,500 projects were conducted at Agricultural Experiment Stations, each focused on responding to a particular opportunity in their state or territory that can help America’s food supply chain be more resilient to emerging challenges.

Because of the inextricable relationship between food and the environment, many Agricultural Experiment Station research projects have components that assess environmental issues and impacts. These projects are led by thousands of professors, who are supported by thousands more staff, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students, as well as collaborators from other public and private organizations. In 2021 alone, 26.3 million research hours were spent by Agricultural Experiment Station scientists and staff developing impactful agricultural and food research.

But what ethical guidelines help researchers ensure that the protocols and methods they use consider the environmental impact of the research itself?

A team of UNH researchers that includes Station scientist Adam Wymore, a research assistant professor in the natural resources and the environment department at UNH, and Ph.D. student Desneiges (Deni) Murray offers a framework for exactly that—environmentally and ecologically responsible research—in a recently published paper in Earth’s Future.

The proposed Environmental Responsibility 5-R Framework, or ER⁵F, was inspired by the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee, the internationally recognized framework governing animal care in research. The researchers found that there currently exists no universally applied framework for mitigating research impacts on the environment.

“Such frameworks exist for research involving animal and human subjects, but there seemed to be a void of similar protocols with respect to environmental subjects,” said Murray. “For ER⁵F, the overall goal is acknowledging research’s environmental impact and generating effective change towards mitigating the direct and indirect consequences of scientific practices.

“For ER⁵F, the overall goal is acknowledging research’s environmental impact and generating effective change towards mitigating the direct and indirect consequences of scientific practices.”

The 5-Rs of the Environmental Responsibility framework include: Recognition, Refinement, Reduction, Replacement and Restoration. ER⁵F begins with Recognizing the impact that research can have on the environment, with each subsequent ‘R’ providing an opportunity for “acknowledging, evaluating, and mitigating the environmental impacts of scientific research,” according to the journal article.

“Recognizing our impact is a very important first step,” Wymore said. “This framework is not intended as judgement, but rather as an honest assessment, and recognition is intrinsic to each of the iterative and action-based goals of the subsequent R’s.”

“This framework is not intended as judgement, but rather as an honest assessment, and recognition is intrinsic to each of the iterative and action-based goals of the subsequent R’s.”

ER⁵F was designed to be used at any point within the scientific process, from initial inception or proposal writing to data collection and study completion.

"The ER⁵F process can be applied to lab, field and computational work—each of which have different forms of impact,” said Murray. “It’s neither intended to focus on an individual’s personal actions or carbon footprint nor to provide a legal framework, but rather to encourage the scientific research community to consider the environmental impacts resulting from the design and implementation of their research.”

“Sometimes ER5F will help identify opportunities for environmental mitigation and other times it won’t—both outcomes are okay and it’s really the effort that’s most important,” she added.

The Environmental Responsibility Framework: A toolbox for recognizing and promoting ecologically-conscious research was co-authored by Deni Murray; Adam Wymore; post-doctoral researcher Hannah Fazekas; Ph.D. students Eric Parker, Allison Herreid, and Anna Mikulis (née Lowien); undergraduate UNH student Isabel Cole; Nicolas Nunez from the University of Puerto Rico; and agroecosystem scientist Mitchell Donovan of Terra Informatics.