Current projectReport

Climate change, health and ethics

Embedding ethics across policy and practice addressing climate change and health.

The environment and health is a priority area for the NCOB, as set out in our new strategy. Within this area, we have decided to focus on how ethics can support UK policymakers who need to navigate the immediate and enduring global threat to health that climate change poses.

Our project is exploring how ethics can help decision-makers balance the trade-offs in addressing the impact of climate change on health. We are developing case studies to showcase the decisions that policymakers and others are dealing with in their work, highlighting here and how ethics could be better embedded in policy and engaged for the benefit of us all.

To help inform our work we commissioned an ethics literature review and a legal and regulatory review, which are published below.

Any views expressed in these reviews are the author’s own and not those of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Literature review

Ethical approaches at the intersection of climate change, the environment and health

By Dr Cristian Timmermann, Katharina Wabnitz, and Dr Verina Wild, University of Augsburg

Read the literature review

Legal and regulatory review

Climate change, the environment and health in the UK

By Dr Richard Caddell, Reader in Marine and Environmental Law, Cardiff University

Read the legal and regulatory review