News24th March 2025
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) has begun working with international partners to develop global guidelines for ethics committees who assess research relating to climate change and health.
The environment & healthClimate
The one-year long ‘R(H)OPE’ project, funded by the World Health Organization (WHO), will convene seven international partners and challenge them to explore the concept of a ‘right to an open future’. The project aims to assess how this concept could manifest as an ethical obligation that binds current and future generations, and how it could help inform ethical decision-making related to climate change and health.
Together, we will be looking at how decisions are being made in research areas such as: climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, the health impacts of climate change, and the health research that may inadvertently drive climate change.
As part of the project, we plan to host an interdisciplinary workshop to explore the scope of a ‘right to an open future’, and how a framework could assist in balancing different interests, especially when there may be trade-offs in terms of likely benefits and harms.
We will also be asking how anything we develop can be practically applied by the national and research ethics committees responsible for making decisions related to climate change and health research.
Our discussions will likely explore how to:
* represent the interests of non-human species and future generations, whose health is inescapably intertwined with our own.
* ensure that context, especially the international nature of climate change, is appropriately acknowledged throughout decision-making.
* balance what is owed individually versus collectively.
Our findings will be integrated into the co-development of international guidelines with our R(H)OPE project partners.
> _Joining this project will allow us to build upon our recent report, which urges policy and decision makers to recognise, consider and address the intersections between climate change and health, and to embed ethics into their work from the outset._
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> _Working with international partners to develop guidelines for ethics committees will strengthen the way climate change and health research is undertaken globally. This will undoubtedly lead to long-term benefits for all species today and into the future.”_
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> **Maili Raven-Adams, Senior Researcher at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics**
Read our ‘Climate change and health: embedding ethics into policy and decision making’ report [here](https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/publication/climate-change-and-health-embedding-ethics-into-policy-and-decision-making/).
_Notes_
* _This R(H)OPE study was commissioned and paid for by the World Health Organization (WHO)._
* _Copyright of the original work on which this article is based belongs to WHO. The NCOB have been given permission to publish this article._
* _The views expressed in this news article are of the author and they do not necessarily represent the views, decisions or policies of the WHO._
* _Our Partners are based at_ _Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Université de Liège (Belgium), Université de Mons_ _(Belgium)__, Mexico National Commission on Bioethics (Mexico), West Indies University (Barbados), Université Alassane Ouattara (Ivory Coast) and Bangladesh Bioethics Society (Bangladesh)_.