How our research community is supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Our University’s purpose is ‘To make a positive and decisive difference to people, organisations and communities’. As part of this, our research and knowledge exchange (KE) services are vital for enabling positive change at a local and regional level, as well as responding to national and international challenges. Therefore, we play a critical role in supporting the success of the SDGs.

Here at LBU, our research and KE activities and communities are aligned particularly strongly with seven of the SDGs: Sustainable Cities and Communities, Affordable and Clean Energy, Good Health and Wellbeing, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Gender Equality, Climate Action, and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.

We have also designed our new LBU strategic research themes to ensure relevance to the SDGs and support interdisciplinary research across the institution. Our new research themes are: Green, Sustainable Communities, Sport and Healthy Communities, and Inclusive, Prosperous Communities.

Examples of SDG areas where we are particularly strong here at LBU include:

The work of our Leeds Sustainability Institute (LSI) – who are among the top research teams carrying out scientific field trials in the UK, to show how buildings perform in the real world. Their work is strongly supporting SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy and SDG 13 - Climate Action.

Our extensive business support programme – including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) and Help to Grow: Management, spans schools across the University and is contributing to SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth – and our Research Centre for Social Justice in Sport and Society is directly improving gender equity in sport coaching, contributing to SDG 5 - Gender Equality.

In our School of Health, Professor Maria Maynard leads the Migrant Health Research Group and the Tackling Disparities theme of the Obesity Institute, which all support SDG 3 – Good Health and Wellbeing.

How we’re measuring our SDG support

From an outputs and impact perspective, we encourage all researchers to add an SDG label to all of their research outputs and impact records entered into Symplectic – this enables us to measure the number of research outputs - and related impact focused activity - aligned to each SDG and puts us in a strong position for some of our key funders, including UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

Watch this space!

In future blog posts, we will spotlight both individual projects supporting SDGs and the SDGs where we are contributing strong research and impact. 
As we further our work on collating information around our research and its alignment with the SDGs, we will be using our data to apply for awards to help strengthen our reputation in our SDG strengths, and attract further funding for projects.