Speaker
Description
Accelerator-based research infrastructures are among the most scientifically productive facilities worldwide, but their operation is also associated with significant energy demands, resource consumption, and environmental impacts. As future accelerator facilities pursue increasingly ambitious scientific and technical goals, the need for transparent and quantitative approaches to sustainability assessment is becoming increasingly important.
This contribution presents a framework for the standardized assessment of sustainability in accelerator research infrastructures, developed within the context of the European project Research Facility 2.0 (RF2.0). The framework focuses on environmental sustainability while maintaining links to operational and scientific performance. It organizes sustainability assessment into the domains of resources, energy, and greenhouse-gas emissions, and introduces a set of quantifiable indicators that enable systematic evaluation of facilities, technical systems, and alternative design solutions. A distinctive feature of the methodology is the incorporation of scientific output and operational time as normalization parameters, thereby connecting sustainability performance directly to the mission of research infrastructures. The framework further supports aggregation into composite sustainability scores while preserving transparency and traceability of individual indicators. The presentation will summarize the rationale behind the proposed metrics, their mathematical structure, and their application to accelerator technologies and infrastructure-level assessments.
In addition, selected insights from international sustainability studies involving research infrastructures and accelerator facilities will be discussed, highlighting common priorities, opportunities for energy efficiency improvements, and emerging approaches for integrating sustainability considerations into future facility planning and operation.