At the recently concluded global open-source sustainability conference Brightcon 2025, the "Tiangong Initiative," led by Tsinghua University, was honored with the conference's core award—the 2025 Brightcon Award for Open Sustainability—in recognition of its groundbreaking contributions to the field of open data.

2025 Brightcon Award for Open Sustainability

Professor Xu Ming, Vice Dean of the School of Environment at Tsinghua University, accepted the award on behalf of the Tianguang team. In his acceptance speech, he expressed that this award is not only a testament to the hard work of all teams involved in the Tianguang Initiative but also an acknowledgment of the long-term exploration by Chinese academia, industry, and research sectors in open science and sustainable development. He emphasized that the Tianguang Initiative remains committed to advancing the global Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data co-construction mechanism through open collaboration, with the hope of partnering with more international stakeholders in the future to jointly build a credible, transparent, and interoperable global LCA data infrastructure.

Professor Xu Ming Accepts the Award Online on Behalf of the Tianguang Team

During the conference, Lu Xiaohui, an assistant researcher at Tsinghua University's School of Environment and a member of the Tianguang Initiative, delivered a presentation and participated in a roundtable discussion. She engaged in in-depth discussions with experts from organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Life Cycle Initiative (LCI) and PRé Sustainability on key topics, including building community trust, ensuring data quality and interoperability, and exploring sustainable funding models. She also shared insights and forward-thinking perspectives from the Tianguang Initiative.

Brightcon, initiated by the highly dynamic open-source LCA community Brightway, has evolved into a premier open-source sustainability conference that brings together representatives from research institutions, international organizations, and enterprises. The 2025 conference, themed "Open Data," focused on the application and prospects of open-source tools and data in LCA. The newly established 2025 Brightcon Award for Open Sustainability aims to recognize projects and teams that have made outstanding contributions to open science and data co-construction, providing a significant platform for collaboration within the global data ecosystem.