Sustainable development strategy

CERMA’s sustainable development strategy dates back to spring 2019 during a meeting with members which showed the need to direct the Center towards research avenues that better integrate sustainability. A strategy was therefore developed and was presented to members at the General Assembly in January 2021. The approach is represented below:

This new strategy is seen as a way of opening a common/unifying/transversal axis of research at CERMA on which everyone could contribute to:

Encourage intra-center collaborations
Help members in their research: better meet the requirements of granting organizations and society, open up new research themes
Give more space to SD in research work or in member presentations
Expose students to complementary skills
Develop transdisciplinary research on materials
Collaborate, influence and/or learn from the advanced materials ecosystem to accelerate the socio-ecological transition

Activities undertaken

To begin its action, CERMA has developed a few activities:

• Webinar Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals into materials science research
• Webinar Material footprint and technological innovation: for more sustainable development
• Spring IT cleaning

CERMA also collaborated with the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en opérationnalisation du développement durable (CIRODD) on the development of the concept of sustainable innovation and its implementation in Quebec. CERMA was notably involved in the drafting of:

• a white paper and guidelines for implementing sustainable innovations in Quebec
• of a brief submitted to the consultations for the 2022 Quebec research and innovation strategy