The carbon footprint of research activities is increasingly well-documented, but estimates of their environmental impacts beyond climate change remain scarce. This gap makes it difficult to assess the unintended consequences of climate change mitigation strategies. To address this problem, we collected activity data from a hundred research institutes in France and applied a tiered hybrid life cycle assessment (LCA) to estimate their impacts at the midpoint and endpoint levels, taking one research staff as the functional unit. As it happens for the carbon footprint (De Paepe et al. in PLOS Sustain Transform 3(7):e0000116, 2024), purchases dominate endpoint damages to human health and ecosystem quality, accounting for half of the damages in France. However, when extrapolating the data to carbon-intensive electric mixes, electricity-associated damages become dominant. Beyond climate change, particulate matter, water availability and, possibly, human toxicity drive human health damages, and land occupation and acidification drive ecosystem quality impacts. In addition, we disclose the elementary flows contributing to endpoint damages and provide a critical analysis of the tiered hybridization method employed. Finally, our analysis reveals that a decarbonization scenario combining five mitigation strategies reduces the per-capita carbon footprint by 25% (− 1.8 t CO2-eq). The most significant contribution comes from vehicle electrification (− 8.9%), followed by aviation reductions (− 5.7%), biomass heating (− 5.6%), and relocating purchases (− 4.5%), though the estimate for purchase relocation carries great uncertainty. In our model, this decarbonization scenario has a negative impact on just one midpoint indicator: land occupation. Our work thus advances organizational-LCA methodology, provides a multicriteria national-scale estimate, and informs public decision-making on mitigation pathways for the research sector.
