Women in Climate (WiC) network
Women in Climate (WiC) network
Posted by Penny Maher
26 September 2025For this month’s Women in Climate event, we focused on what it means to create impact with your research. In preparation for this session, people were invited to view a training video from the Impact Essential Series. We are very grateful to Felicity Notley from the University of Exeter’s “Impact@Exeter” team, who joined the session, giving us a very helpful overview of the topic at the beginning of the session and responding to participant’s questions throughout. The rest of the session was an open discussion where participants asked questions, shared their own experiences and discussed challenges of impactful research.
We learned that research impact can be defined as the change that occurs as a result of research, beyond the academic realm (see e.g. UKRI for detailed definition). For example, this might be adoption of new policies resulting from research on harmful pollutants in the environment. There are several sectors that the research impact can target – so called impact categories – including for example health & wellbeing, creativity, culture & society, commerce & the economy, public policy, law & services and the environment (see REF2021 Annex A for more impact categories).
While research publications, presentations at conferences, preparing policy briefs, media engagement etc. (i.e. research outputs and impact pathways) are important contributions to creating impact, the `research impact’ is considered to occur once the societal/environmental change occurs. There are many benefits to translating research into real-world impact, including benefits to e.g. society, the environment, the economy, … as well as furthering one’s career/recognition and increasing chances of winning future funding. While it can be challenging to think about how to translate research into impact, a helpful tool is `Theory of Change’ framework, see Matter of Focus for more details, a step-by-step approach from visualising the problem you are trying to address to defining impact goals, choosing appropriate impact pathways and finally to generate the impact. When planning research projects, it can be very helpful to engage with stakeholders early on and co-design the project, to ensure research impacts and be able to quantify/evidence them.
During the discussion, a recurring theme was thinking about the timescales and sizes of different projects: a large team might have people dedicated to the research and others dedicated to translating the research into impact over many years, while an individual researcher on a short-term project might be looking at much smaller scale impact pathways. It is encouraging to remember that your contribution as a researcher on a large project will also contribute towards the final impact even if at that time it was purely conducting research, and to realise that the targets for an individual small-scale project would be different from larger-scale projects. It is also helpful to remember that contributing to the research culture (e.g. helping/teaching new colleagues, passing on code, etc.) are very valuable contributions to the overall project and, down the line, the research impact.
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