Scientific advances facilitate formulation and practical implementation of climate-conscious clinical medical ethics

Global climate change due to anthropogenic carbon emissions has created and deepened problems in medicine and public health, such as ecological upheavals and ambient heat-associated health detriments. The fields of biomedicine and biomedical ethics must pay heed to problems arising from global climate change, but such reflection on research into climate change-responses appear inadequate [1]. A number of authors have proposed changes or climate change-related extensions to existing biomedical ethics frameworks. These range from Hantel and colleagues’ scope-expanding and climate-conscious updates [2] to Jonsen and Siegler’s four-topics principles of clinical medical ethics (CME) (“medical indications”, “preferences of patients”, “quality of life”, and contextual features) [3], which are lucid and informative. However, prescriptive theoretical frameworks have limits in their epistemic construction and practical constraints in implementation. Below, I shall cite three examples that illustrate how advances in science and research are needed to facilitate climate-conscious extensions to more classical CME.