Various efforts are currently being made to reduce the environmental impacts of French scientific research. One of the initial efforts is through the actions of the GDR Labos 1point5. These actions are crucial for raising awareness and/or mobilising researchers to reduce the environmental (if not carbon) footprint of research, while providing top-tier data on greenhouse gas emissions linked to laboratory operations. However, these efforts remain insufficient to comprehensively assess the various impacts associated with French research, particularly in the fields of engineering and emerging technologies. In particular, these actions do not take into account recent developments in environmental assessment methodologies, notably Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA was initially developed to evaluate industrial products, manufactured identically at large scale, and derived from mature technical systems where reliable data can be collected, limiting temporal, spatial, and technological variability.

Currently, there is a strong European interest in the development of prospective or ex-ante LCA, applied to technologies under development in research projects, technologies that are inherently immature, prior to their large-scale market deployment. In this context, LCA should, according to van der Giesen et al. (2020), "anticipate avoidable potential environmental impacts", "avoid environmental lock-ins", "analyse the potential environmental impacts of a technology at an early stage of its development", and "avoid investments in technologies with high environmental impacts". This analysis also involves considering assumptions about the evolution of the socio-economic system at different geographical scales, which condition both the acceptability of certain technoscientific proposals and their relevance in terms of reducing environmental impacts, for example, based on planetary boundaries.

This session will bring together actors involved in the environmental assessment of scientific research projects, and will review 1) the approaches used to assess the environmental impact of research as it is currently carried out, but above all 2) the methodological developments that will make it possible to assess the impact of future uses. des innovations technologiques issues des laboratoires de recherche. Dans cette optique d’évaluation prospective sur le cycle de vie, il s’agira notamment de discuter des verrous scientifiques à lever, relatifs à la disponibilité de données de premier plan représentatives du système technologique en cours de développement, aux projections quant au « futur paysage de déploiement de la technologie », et à la prise en compte des « deep » incertitudes afférentes. Ces verrous renvoient à la prise en compte, pour l’évaluation environnementale d’une technologie, des changements d’échelle qu’impliquent son déploiement (Shibasaki et al 2007 ; Piccinno et al 2016), de son niveau de maturité technologique (TRL) et des incertitudes sur les résultats (Groen et al 2014 ; Igos et al 2019).