How our Greener, Sustainable Communities strategic research theme embraces the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

Which SDGs are LSI focussing on?

At the LSI, we could claim casual links between our research and many of the SDGs, as perhaps most researchers can if they look hard enough for a connection. For instance, our research helps towards: eradicating fuel poverty by improving thermal performance of homes (SDG 1: No Poverty), improving comfort, indoor air quality and reducing mould by providing better quality ventilation and insulation (SDG 3: Good Health and Wellbeing), improving knowledge and skills in the construction industry by highlighting technical risks with installing retrofit (SDG 4: Quality Education), testing new innovations for net zero heating (SDG 7: Affordable Clean Energy), and comparing the life cycle impacts of demolishing old buildings or building new (SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production).

However, the reality is that the SDGs are more than simply having similar sounding research themes. To understand if research really contributes to the SDGs, one needs to delve a little deeper. Below I’ve highlighted two specific SDGs and described how the LSI really does help generate new knowledge to support them:

SDG13: Climate Action

This goal urges nations to “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” and in the UK this translates to what we often call Net Zero.  Specifically, the key to unlocking net zero in the UK, as anyone who has seen my TedX Talk will know, is to decarbonise electricity and electrify heating in homes, i.e., get rid of our gas boilers. One of the main problems with this is we don’t have enough electricity, and so we need to reduce the amount of heating we use by retrofitting our homes with insulation.

Recently the LSI were commissioned by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to undertake the Demonstration of Energy Efficiency Potential project to explore how such retrofits can be installed safely and effectively, how they can be improved, made simpler, and be modelled and measured more accurately. For anyone interested, here is a short video of the findings, which we hope will be embraced by Government to produce new regulations and policy to support the UK’s net zero journey.

SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

This goal aims to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” and specifically, high on the agenda for this SDG are Air pollution and Urban heat.

Under the LSI’s Sustainable Urban Environments research theme, Dr Jim Parker has been pioneering new sensing technologies to map microclimate conditions across urban areas in different grey and green spaces; this helps to understand how nature based solutions can mitigate the urban heat island. Using a network of air quality sensors across the West Yorkshire Combined Authority area, Jim’s research is helping to show how air quality data can be collected effectively and accurately and made open access, so that air quality is brought into decision making processes and can’t be so easily ignored.

All of these data will soon be made available to all through the “Sensing Leeds” project. City and region scale project outputs will become available later in 2025. This short animation helps to illustrate the impact our urban green spaces can have at a local scale in city centre environments. This democratisation of environmental data is translatable to help reduce air pollution in other cities and communities and even other countries.

LBU's commitment to SDGs

The LSI is just one of many research teams at LBU contributing achieving the SDGs as these become an increasingly integral component of all our research activity, and you can read more about LBU’s contribution to SDGs in our recent Chamber of Commerce magazine article.

In addition, as a University we are introducing processes to map how our research across all Schools in the University aligns with the SDGs. This includes ensuring appropriate SDG labels are flagged against all our research outputs within our internal research systems and, for new research projects, requiring that researchers consider how their projects relate to SDGs. These data will be linking these to researcher profiles to improve visibility and gain university-wide insights into LBUs broad contribution and commitment to the SDGs.

Read more about how our research community is supporting the SDGs in our blog post by Dr Camelia Dijkstra, Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange Services at Leeds Beckett University.