Ethics in health and climate change

The World Health Organization recognises climate change as the biggest health threat facing humanity. Rising surface temperatures will further drive extreme climatic events, the migration of disease vectors, food instability, human displacement and a range of other threats to human and environmental health.

Less well recognised are the ethical challenges of responding to these health threats. Given the WHO’s commitment to universal health coverage, Member States will have to navigate difficult questions including which health threats should take precedence and why, what priority should be given to vulnerable populations, and what trade-offs are acceptable where the interests of the environment conflict with immediate human interests. Without ethical awareness, policy will fail to identify competing interests, value conflicts and unintended consequences and will be deemed unfair or otherwise unethical.  

This programme of work is designed to support Member States in this challenging, rapidly evolving area. It will deliver a range of supporting tools and materials, helping Member States clarify and navigate ethical issues across the health and climate change field. It is supported by the Technical Advisory Group on Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy, whose members were appointed in December 2023 for an initial two-year term. Reports from the meetings will be published on this page once the meeting minutes have been approved.

The project has conducted a landscape review on the literature at the intersection of ethics, health and climate change; and published a call to action on the role of ethics in climate change health policy and a call for papers on the ethics of research into health and climate change. A call for research proposals in April 2024 resulted in the funding of 31 research projects covering all WHO Regions, and a collection of case studies exploring ethical challenges and guiding values in climate and health initiatives is under development.