Luke’s Sustainability Goals and Report 2022

The purpose of this report is to inform citizens, decision-makers and the research and business communities about our research and solutions in the context of five UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The examples and results presented in the report relate specifically to 2022. Due to the nature of research, results often take years to achieve and typically require collaboration with other research organisations and the business community.

The case examples have been selected from our large project portfolio based on suggestions from the research programmes. The aim is to provide a comprehensive account of our research and other activities, and to identify the progress we have made on the selected SDGs. The report also presents our work towards Luke’s responsibility goals in 2022.

In addition to management and researchers, our Research Infrastructure Services unit, which is responsible for the launch of Luke’s new environmental programme, was involved in the work. Staff from Finance and Facilities, HR, Communication and Marketing, and Research and Customer Relationships also contributed to the content.

Luke’s Sustainability Report is published annually in accordance with the State Treasury guidelines.

Our internal responsibility goals are divided into responsible research, social responsibility, financial responsibility and environmental responsibility. Luke’s responsibility goals were first set in 2021. Based on lessons learned and experience, we have decided to update some of these goals in 2023.  For example, for some of the goals, our estimates of the timeframe for implementation have proved to be unrealistic.

We will continue to monitor progress against these goals until 2025, the end of the current strategy period.

In 2021, we identified five SDGs that are most relevant to Luke’s operations. In this Sustainability Report, we describe how our activities can contribute to achieving these goals.

As a research and specialist organisation, our main means of influencing the selected SDGs is to provide reliable research-based information and solutions. We monitor our progress towards these goals through the number of research publications and the proportion of open access publications. We also monitor the number of synthesis reports of the research conducted, as well as the number of policy recommendations linked to each SDG. Luke’s policy recommendations address current issues in a concise and reasoned way to help decision-makers make informed choices.

To identify publications that promote the selected SDGs, the BTA (Bergen topic-approach) queries developed at the University of Bergen were used.

Queries were run to identify the number of scientific peer-reviewed publications linked to each of the five SDGs and the proportion of these publications that are openly available.

he BTA queries for SDGs 12 and 15 were only developed in 2022, so this is the first time that publication numbers for these SDGs have been included in the Sustainability Report. In addition, the queries for SDGs 2, 13 and 14 were modified during 2022 through international collaboration, so it is not meaningful to compare the 2022 publication numbers with previous years. In the query-based method, publications are identified by searching for the terms used in the query or in the sub-goals or indicators of each SDG in publication titles, keywords and abstracts.