The CNRS, a global player in environmental transition and social responsibility

Antoine Petit wishes to make things clear. "There are extremely close links between the environmental and human dimensions of the socio-ecological transition. Environmental issues can be linked to the organisation of work, individual and collective practices and social dialogue, one of our main objectives being to enhance the quality of work and life", he explains. The CNRS Chairman and CEO goes on to stress the need for coherency within the organisation. "We have to do our job – excellent research that serves society – more sustainably. So we need to roll out a proactive policy, just like our Overall Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility Plan (DD&RS1 )".

The CNRS will be publishing its DD&RS Plan at the start of 2025 along with its Objectives, Resources and Performance Contract. The new plan is a strategic, transversal roadmap of ongoing or planned actions along with details of monitoring indicators for the transition. All organisations under the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research's supervisory authority are gradually adopting similar overall plans based on a shared reference template. For joint laboratories, this pooled approach is encouraging because it shows their supervisory authorities' convergence and coherency. 

Integrating social and environmental concerns is part of an underlying global trend. Since the 1992 Rio Summit, the United Nations and the European Union (EU) have encouraged public and private stakeholders to promote the social responsibility of organisations. The DD&RS Plan is one of the latest French examples of organisations following this idea. The new Plan covers the 2025-2027 period and derives from a collegial process at all levels of the CNRS, from local to national, and involving all CNRS disciplines and professions. The aim is to fully involve all CNRS staff members – from its core researchers to support staff – to amplify and structure the CNRS policy in favour of the environmental transition and social responsibility.

Consolidating commitments

In this way the publication of the DD&RS Plan represents "a strategic opportunity to bolster the CNRS's environmental and societal action", explains Antoine Petit. In fact, the CNRS has adopted a long-term approach to the environmental transition. In 2020, the organisation's sustainable development roadmap set out our commitment to increasingly taking the environmental impact of research into account more comprehensively and this was taken further in 2023 with the CNRS's low-carbon transition plan. This plan was an operational response to the findings of 2023's initial assessment of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, an exercise repeated in 2024 with the assessment of emissions in 2022.

In 2022, the organisation's General Management referred the issue to the CNRS Ethics Committee which gave its opinion at the end of the same year, concluding with its view that "it is the collective responsibility of research personnel to take the environmental dimension of research into account". Following on from this recommendation, in January 2024 the CNRS joined all France's national research organisations and the National Research Agency in signing a declaration of commitment to take collective action to promote socio-ecological transitions to work towards France's objective of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. This national commitment is coupled with a European-level commitment through a new and equally significant initiative, the Heidelberg agreement in favour of sustainable research signed in October last year by the CNRS and twelve other major European research stakeholders.

Research is at the core of the new DD&RS Plan which features the integration of environmental ethics into the research life cycle, the assessment of research's environmental footprint and an enhanced emphasis on sustainable development activities and achievements in research assessment. Environmental transition issues also represent an innovative, sustainable and attractive line of research that the CNRS will encourage further. Projects of this sort will be supported by research programmes and DD&RS-dedicated calls for projects while the CNRS will go on promoting innovation and transferring the right solutions to speed up the environmental transition. 

The same is true for the other aspect of the DD&RS Plan, social responsibility. Antoine Petit explains that ''for many years the CNRS has endeavoured to work with a committed human resources policy to respond to our staff members' expectations and, through these, to deal with important social issues". This is clearly reflected in the CNRS's being part of the European Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R) since 2017 and the organisation obtaining the renewal of its HRS4R label. This label was created by the European Commission in 2008 to recognise scientific organisations for the quality of their human resources policy and for encouraging researcher mobility throughout the EU. The CNRS is also firmly committed to diversity, particularly the employment of the disabled (four successive action plans have addressed the issue) and professional gender equality. The organisation's commitment to the latter issue led to the 2001 creation of the Mission for Women's Integration and was recognised last year when the European Commission awarded the CNRS the European Gender Equality Prize in the 'advanced' category.

"Our ambitious DD&RS Plan continues along the same lines as our previous commitments", explains the CNRS Chairman and CEO. "It is based on our institution's founding values and our staff members' collective commitment. The aim is to make the CNRS a leading public stakeholder for the environmental transition and social responsibility".

A systemic vision with over 100 interconnected actions

In practical terms, the CNRS's DD&RS Plan is structured around four main themes – strategy and governance; research and innovation; the environment; and social policy. 25 themes linked to the socio-environmental transition are listed, with the Plan based on a systemic and interconnected approach aimed at promoting co-benefits and avoiding contradictory factors. The Plan also ensures that the existing thematic plans are consistent. One example is the CNRS's low-carbon transition plan whose first achievements are already apparent.

The Plan sets out over 100 structuring actions in areas like low-carbon mobility, responsible digital technology or controlled waste. These include initiatives to reduce the environmental footprint of purchasing which accounted for 85% of CNRS greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 and to support laboratories in pooling resources, using equipment longer and the pooled purchasing of consumables. The DD&RS Plan also posits the creation of a sustainability skills centre to extend and transpose the EcoInfo research and service group's responsible digital technology model to other aspects of the transition.

The Plan also provides more detailed measurement of the CNRS's carbon footprint and also widens the measurement scope for the organisation's environmental impact to include its impact on soil and biodiversity, preserving water resources, the transition to a sustainable food supply and pollution or waste management. Antoine Petit explains that "one of the main challenges today, moving beyond pure 'mitigation', is to anticipate risks that hinder our scientific and technical potential and prepare for such risks using an 'adaptation' approach in the framework of the national plans for adapting to climate change". Here, the environmental transition and social policy clearly overlap. To support its staff members in this process, the CNRS is anticipating the need for new key skills which have to be identified, developed and supported to set up efficient specialist teams to support the transition. The organisation also needs to anticipate transformations to professional skills in the context of global change while also responding to the growing requirement for agents to commit to working towards transitions. "The transition can only be effectively achieved by promoting employee well-being and reinforcing prevention, the quality of life and health and safety in the workplace", stresses Antoine Petit.

To sum up then, "the DD&RS plan invites us to rethink our research practices on the collective scale", concludes Antoine Petit. "We're making an active contribution through this scheme to strengthening research into environmental impacts, supporting the entire chain of stakeholders – from individuals to laboratories and right up to our governing bodies – in integrating environmental ethics and societal responsibility into research projects, from their initial development to technology transfer at the end."

• 1This stands for Développement durable & responsabilité sociale, the French title.