Participating in Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA) SIG Working Groups

​​By Charlotte Rae, on behalf of the SEA-SIG

The Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA) SIG has formed three new Working Groups, to tackle the environmental impact of the annual meeting, assess environmental implications of neuroimaging research activities, and educate our community on these.

What are the new Working Groups?

In December 2020, we held two open meetings to talk about the priority actions for our new SIG with the OHBM community. We had colleagues attend from across the world, who shared fantastic ideas on how we should make OHBM activities more sustainable.

From these meetings, there was a pretty clear consensus that we needed to tackle three areas: the Annual Meeting, neuroimaging research pipelines, and education. So, we have set up three new Working Groups that will focus on these particular domains.

The Annual Meeting Working Group will assess the environmental impact of the Annual Meeting, investigate sustainable conference models, and make recommendations to the Council for how to create a more sustainable Annual Meeting beyond COVID-19.

The Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Working Group will assess the environmental impact of neuroimaging research pipelines, investigate how we could do our research more sustainably, and create resources and publications to support neuroimagers in greening their research practices.

The Education & Outreach Working Group will collaborate with the other two to educate our community about the impacts our research activities have, including putting on events around the Annual Meeting. It will also seek to collaborate with industry and sister neuroscience societies. In these collaborations and in guiding the SIG's own activities, it will use insights from psychological and neuroscientific work on how humans respond to communications about climate change and environmental issues.

How can I get involved?

We hope that there are lots of OHBM members who are interested in participating in these groups to help us achieve our sustainability objectives!

For example, in the Annual Meeting group, we want to comprehensively assess what the environmental impacts were of recent in-person (e.g. Rome, 2019) and online (2020, 2021) meetings. Looking forward, we hope to then investigate how much our meeting footprint would be reduced if we adopted potential alternative conference models, such as hybrid (with some in-person and some online content), hub-and-spoke (where we have several meeting locations and you travel to your nearest), or moving to a biennial meeting. Many other societies and conferences are considering such options (Figure 1). For the Working Group, we need colleagues who are interested in looking at these options and putting together a report for Council. We are very fortunate that Sepideh Sadaghiani, an experienced member of the Program Committee, has come on board to chair this Working Group.

Figure 1. Alternative conference models to an annual in-person meeting, and how much carbon would be saved, for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) (Klower et al, 2020, Nature). The three cities illustrated are potential hubs based on the attendance patterns of AGU conferences.

In the Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Group, we need colleagues who are up for digging down into all the details of a neuroimaging workflow, from hardware and data acquisition to analysis and computing infrastructure. Ideally, we want to quantify the potential environmental implications of all these stages, so we can produce resources for the neuroimaging community that would allow researchers to plug in their pipeline protocol and get a measure of its environmental footprint. Of course the next step is then to provide resources for our community to enable them to go about changing this for the better - establishing what best practice looks like for sustainable neuroimaging. In this group, we will need colleagues from across OHBM disciplines who have experience across all sorts of neuroimaging processing streams. We might also seek to collaborate with external experts such as cloud computing providers.

​The Education & Outreach Working Group will have quite a broad remit around educating our community about the impacts our research activities have, in concert with the other two groups. Here we need colleagues who have experience in (or want to get experience in!) areas such as putting on events around the annual meeting, like symposia and socials; interfacing with industry and sister neuroscience societies; and perhaps even bringing psychology-based knowledge of what works well when communicating about climate change, to make sure we are operating as effectively as possible in the SEA-SIG as a whole.

As well as general group members, we are looking for two individuals who might be interested in Chairing the Neuroimaging Research Pipelines and Education & Outreach groups. 

I’m in! What are the next steps?
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If you would like to participate in any of the three groups, or would like further information, please do get in touch with us at [email protected]. We welcome informal enquiries if you are not sure before you sign up to participate!

For further details on the aims and objectives for each group, see our new website at ohbm-environment.org

If you know a colleague who would be ideal to contribute to one of our groups, please do pass on our details. And you can retweet our Twitter post announcing the groups.

We look forward to sharing updates on the Working Groups’ progress soon!