Health research is vital in advancing human well-being, but it is also a contributor to climate change and other environmental degradation. A growing bottom up advocacy movement is engaged in developing measures (often called ‘tools’) to help researchers better understand the ways in which they can mitigate these environmental harms. While limited evidence suggests benefits of using these tools, ethical and social challenges remain, including questions about whether tools will place undue burdens on researchers; whether tools will be effective in supporting large scale environmental harm mitigation; whether compliance based use of tools will remove opportunities to have wider discussions about what it means to conduct research in an environmentally sustainable way; and whether tools–which have been developed in high income countries–reinforce existing power imbalances between high and low resource settings and/or fail to address the needs of more marginalised research communities. We describe these issues. Our aim is not to discourage tool use, but to diagnose the ethical and social issues surrounding their adoption, and urge policymakers to reflect on them as the field evolves and these challenges become clearer, so that tools are implemented in a way that is effective and just.
Samuel et al. (Fri,) studied this question.