Climate change, health and ethics

How ethics can help decision-makers balance the trade-offs in addressing the impact of climate change on 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.

To inform our work, which we will publish by the end of this year, we are inviting two tenders:

1. An ethics literature review
2. A legal and regulatory overview

These commissions will provide useful and much needed insights, which we will use to inform our report this year and the case studies that we intend to identify and collate next year.

The case studies we develop will showcase the real trade-offs policymakers and others are dealing with in their work to tackle the health impacts of climate change. This will help to highlight where and how ethics could be better embedded in policy and engaged for the benefit of us all.

Health, climate change and ethics – an overview

On 12 October 2023 we published a new overview paper identifying where key ethical issues are arising in efforts to respond to the health impacts of climate change. We propose a set of principles and themes for considering these ethical issues within policy making decisions.

This paper is the outcome of a scoping exercise we carried out to identify ethical issues, including in relation to actions designed to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It examines these ethical issues under three linked headings:

• the ethics of the climate crisis
• ethical issues arising in responses to the climate crisis
• ethical issues relating to research into those responses

Download the paper: Health, climate change and ethics - an overview