Going beyond harm: A Guide to environmental and climate considerations in research ethics
ModulesGoing beyond harm: A Guide to environmental and climate considerations in research ethics
The main goal of this module is to integrate environmental and climate considerations into research ethics beyond the identification and mitigation of environmental harm, by applying principles of responsibility and precaution, justice and fairness, and participation and inclusion throughout the design, conduct, and review of research.
By the end of the module, learners will be able to:
- Identify environmental and climate-related ethical considerations in research, including broader impacts beyond direct environmental harm.
- Apply principles of responsibility and precaution to research design, methods, transparency, and outputs.
- Assess questions of justice and fairness, including the distribution of research benefits, risks, and burdens across groups and generations.
- Integrate diverse perspectives, forms of knowledge, and stakeholder interests through participatory and inclusive approaches.
- Reflect and act on environmental and climate-related ethical decisions by documenting, monitoring, and revising them throughout the research process.
What is this about?
This module is about integrating environmental and climate considerations into research ethics, going beyond the traditional focus on identifying and preventing harm. It encourages researchers, research teams, and ethics committees to consider how research design, methods, assumptions, and outcomes may affect the environment, society, and future generations, even when no significant environmental harm is expected. It also focuses on three key areas: responsible and precautionary research, just and fair research, and participatory and inclusive research. Overall, it promotes a broader approach to research ethics that considers responsibility, fairness, inclusion, diverse forms of knowledge, and the longer-term consequences of research.
This module is about the guide supports the integration of environmental and climate considerations into research ethics practice beyond harm-based assessment. It is intended for researchers, research teams, research ethics committees (RECs), evaluators, and project coordinators involved in the design, conduct, and review of research. While existing ethics frameworks primarily focus on the identification and prevention of harm (particularly risks to human participants) research activities may raise ethically relevant considerations environmental and climate even where no significant environmental harm is expected. These considerations include questions of responsibility, precaution, justice, fairness, participation, and the longer-term implications of research assumptions, methods, and outputs. The guide complements, but does not replace, the European Commission’s forthcoming Guidance Note on assessing and managing risks of environmental harm in EU-funded research.
Rather than introducing prescriptive rules, it adopts a reflective and context-sensitive approach based on guiding questions and illustrative examples. The guidance is structured around three complementary dimensions of environmentally and climate-responsible research:
- Responsible and precautionary research: encouraging reflection on research design, assumptions, methodological transparency choices, and
- Just and fair research: addressing the distribution of benefits, burdens, risks, and intergenerational implications
- Participatory and inclusive research: focusing on inclusion, pluralism, and recognition of diverse knowledge systems The core message of this guide is that environmental and climate considerations are not limited to risk mitigation. Ethical reflection may also be warranted in relation to how research frames problems, shapes decision-making, and influences societal and environmental trajectories. The guide is designed for flexible use across disciplines and research contexts, supporting ethical reflection, documentation, and discussion within research teams and ethics review processes.
Introduction
Environmental and climate considerations are increasingly recognised as integral to responsible research practice. However, as recent research has highlighted, there is a structural gap in the current ethics landscape (Bourban, 2026) and governance (RE4GREEN, 2025). Existing Research Ethics (RE) literature and frameworks focus primarily on human participants and the ethical acceptability of research involving them, while environmental and climate ethics focus on ecological systems, justice, and sustainability. The two domains rarely intersect. As a result, researchers often lack clear ethical foundations for understanding how their work may engage environmental or climate responsibilities such as questions of responsibility, environmental and climate justice, or long-term environmental implications. The European Commission’s (EC) forthcoming Guidance Note on assessing and managing risks of environmental harm in EU-funded research represents an important development bridging this gap. It offers a clear and practical framework to help applicants, researchers, and ethics evaluators identify, assess, and manage potential environmental harms within EU-funded research. This guide builds on and complements that work. Environmental and climate considerations in RE extend beyond questions of harm. Research activities can raise ethical concerns even when no significant environmental harm is expected, such as when research assumptions, models, or design choices may influence long-term environmental or societal trajectories. This starting guide aims to embed key ethical considerations that are not always captured by harm-based assessments alone into RE practice, helping researchers and evaluators identify relevant environmental and climate considerations during project design, execution and evaluation. It does so by structuring the guidance around three complementary dimensions of environmentally and climate-responsible research. Given the diversity of research domains, methods, and contexts, it is not possible to define a single set of actions that would be appropriate in all cases. For this reason, the guide adopts a reflective approach based on guiding questions and illustrative examples, rather than prescriptive rules. This approach is intended to support context-sensitive ethical reflection, enabling researchers and evaluators to identify relevant environmental and climate considerations in light of their specific research activities.
Responsible and Precautionary Research
This section focuses on how research can be designed and conducted in in contexts where research activities may have environmental or climate relevance, particularly where activities are complex, uncertain, or potentially far-reaching in their effects. The expectations outlined in the EC’s Guidance Note on assessing and managing risks of environmental harm, such as avoiding unnecessary harm, considering less harmful alternatives, and ensuring that research topics, methods, and practices are not likely to generate significant harm are foundational to ethical research. Extending beyond harm avoidance, this section supports reflection on how research choices, methods, and assumptions interact with broader environmental and climate dynamics. It invites the reader to consider not only whether harm is likely to occur, but also how research practices may reinforce particular pathways, norms, or dependencies in contexts characterised by complexity and uncertainty.
Integrate environmental and climate considerations into everyday research governance
Questions to consider:
• How are environmental and climate reflections included in team discussions, planning or documentation?
• How do our procurement, data management, or infrastructure decisions consider environmental or climate relevance, even when these are not the primary focus of the research?
• How is responsibility for raising and documenting environmental and climate considerations clearly understood within the research team?
Example : A consortium adds a short environmental reflection item to its regular meeting agenda, ensuring that environmental considerations become part of ongoing decision-making rather than a one-off consideration.Reflect_Integrate environmental and climate considerations into everyday research governance
Reflect on the assumptions embedded in your research
Questions to consider:
• What do I assume to be necessary, normal, or unavoidable in my research?
• Do these assumptions reinforce patterns that could have environmental or climate implications?
• Could alternative approaches challenge or unsettle these assumptions?
Example : A public health research project on heatwave prevention relies mainly on data collected through smartphone apps , thus assuming that everyone has a smartphone. Reflecting on this assumption may reveal that people with limited digital access are underrepresented in the dataset, including groups living in poorly insulated housing or in urban areas with higher heat exposure. As a result, certain forms of climate-related environmental vulnerability may be insufficiently captured in the evidence base used to understand heat risk and inform adaptation measures. This raises ethical questions about how research assumptions shape which climate impacts, environments, and populations are made visible in research and which ones remain overlooked.
Consider your sphere of influence, not only your direct impacts
Questions to consider:
• Could my method, dataset or workflow become a template that others follow?
• Might my work normalise certain approaches in the field?
• Could downstream use of my outputs have environmental or climate implications beyond this project that I have not yet considered?
Example : A research project develops a model to compare cities or regions for policy or investment purposes based primarily on economic performance indicators, without integrating environmental or climate-related factors. While this may reflect methodological or data limitations, the model’s influence may extend beyond the project itself if it is reused by policymakers, consultants, or other researchers. In such cases, the model can contribute to decision-making frameworks that systematically prioritise economic metrics while downplaying climate risks such as heat exposure, environmental quality, or climate resilience. Reflecting on the project’s sphere of influence highlights the ethical responsibility to consider how research outputs may shape environmentally relevant decisions and priorities beyond their original research context.Reflect_consider your sphere of influence, not only your direct impacts
Practice transparency
Questions to consider:
• What trade-offs shaped my methodological choices (e.g., convenience vs. efficiency)?
• Were environmentally preferable alternatives considered?
• Can I briefly explain why certain options were selected?
Example : A research team models future economic trends while holding environmental and climate conditions constant for the sake of analytical simplicity. While such simplifications are common in research, practising transparency involves explicitly stating this assumption and explaining its implications. In particular, users of the research should be able to understand that the projections do not account for factors such as climate impacts, environmental degradation, or resource constraints that could affect economic feasibility or long-term sustainability. Making these limitations explicit supports responsible use of the results in contexts where environmental and climate conditions are likely to influence outcomes
Just and Fair Research
This section focuses on questions of fairness that arise from how research and innovation affect people, communities, and future generations. It addresses how benefits, burdens, risks, and opportunities associated with research are distributed, and how these effects may vary across social, geographic, and temporal contexts. The guidance uses selected justice perspectives as practical lenses to support ethical reflection.
1. Consider how benefits and burdens are distributed (distributive justice)
Questions to consider:
• What kinds of benefits, opportunities, or advantages may arise from this research (scientific, societal, economic, environmental)?
• Who is likely to benefit from the knowledge, technologies, or outcomes produced by this research?
• Who may bear costs, limitations, or unintended consequences associated with the research or its outcomes?
• Who owns, controls, and can access the data and the outputs of the research? Does the project respect community or Indigenous data governance where relevant (including conditions for sharing and reuse)? (e.g., CARE principles for Indigenous data governance )
Example : A research project uses environmental or socio economic data collected in low- and middle-income countries. However, most of the research benefits, such as high-impact publications, follow-on funding, or agenda-setting influence, accrue to institutions based in the Global North. Reflecting on this distribution highlights potential imbalances between those who contribute data or local knowledge and those who primarily benefit from the research outputs.Reflect_consider how benefits and burdens are distributed (distributive justice)
2. Consider impacts across generations (intergenerational justice)
Questions to consider: across generations
• How might this research affect future generations, even if impacts are not immediate?
• Does the research contribute to pathways that limit future options or create long-term dependencies?
• How are we weighing short-term benefits against potential long-term environmental or societal consequences?
Examples:
A research project prioritises short-term efficiency gains through the rapid deployment of a technology without considering its long-term resource demands or disposal implications. Reflecting on intergenerational justice highlights whether alternative approaches could better preserve options and resources for future generations.
3. Attend to historical and structural inequalities (restorative justice)
Questions to consider:
• Does this research take place in contexts shaped by past injustices, extractive practices2, or long standing inequalities, e.g. in formerly colonised countries?
• Could the research unintentionally reproduce or reinforce these patterns?
• Are there opportunities for us to acknowledge past harms, support repair, or ensure reciprocity in research relationships?
Example : A research project is conducted in a region that has historically been subject to extractive research practices, where data and resources were taken without clear benefits for local communities. Reflecting on restorative justice invites consideration of how the project can engage more respectfully, acknowledge this history, and explore forms of reciprocity or benefit-sharing.Participatory and Inclusive Research
Research engages diverse social contexts, values, and forms of knowledge. Ethical reflection, therefore, extends beyond outcomes to questions of who participates in research and decision-making as well as whose knowledge is treated as legitimate. Where research has environmental or climate implications, these questions are particularly important because research may affect shared environments, local practices, and long-term societal and environmental trajectories. This section focuses on participation, pluralism, inclusion and respecting multiple epistemologies as dimensions of responsible research practice, particularly where research affects communities, relies on local knowledge, or informs societal decisions. Participation is meaningful when contributors can influence research questions, the interpretation of findings, or the use of results, rather than being limited to data provision alone
1. Reflect on who is included in decision-making (procedural justice)
Questions to consider:
• Who is involved in defining research questions, methods, or priorities?
• Are we meaningfully consulting affected groups and individuals during the design and implementation of the research?
• Are participation processes designed so that they enable affected groups to realistically take part?
Example : A consortium designs an environmental monitoring study without consulting local communities. Procedural justice invites reflection on whether earlier or more systematic engagement could improve both inclusiveness and research quality.Reflect on who is included in decision-making (procedural justice)
2. Recognise whose knowledge and perspectives are valued (epistemic and recognitional justice)
Questions to consider:
• Whose knowledge is treated as legitimate in this research?
• Are we prioritising certain forms of knowledge, experience, or expertise over others?
• Are we systematically undervaluing certain perspectives or experiences or treating them as less credible?
• Are the perspectives, values, or practices of affected groups acknowledged and respected?
• Are all contributions to the research process appropriately credited?
Example : A climate adaptation project relies exclusively on technical models developed by external experts, while local or experiential knowledge is not considered relevant to the research. Reflecting on epistemic and recognition justice highlights whether important insights are being overlooked and whether some perspectives are implicitly treated as less credible or valuable.Reflect_Recognise whose knowledge and perspectives are valued (epistemic and recognitional justice)
3. Reflect on how people are involved in the conduct of research
Questions to consider:
- Are we involving participants in research activities that relate directly to environmental or climate conditions in their local context (e.g., observations, monitoring, interpretation of change)?
- Do participatory roles allow contributors to share context-specific environmental knowledge, lived experience, or observations that may not be captured through technical data alone?
- Are we informing participants about how their contributions relate to environmental or climate questions addressed by the research, including how data will be used, shared (e.g., as open data where applicable, or generalised/withheld where precise information could cause environmental harm), and interpreted?
- Are appropriate support, feedback, or training provided to enable meaningful participation in environmentally or climate-relevant research activities?
Reflect on how people are involved in the conduct of research
Further Reading
RE4GREEN (2026). Recommendations on environmental and climate ethics amendment of risk assessment strategies. Deliverable D3.2, RE4GREEN project, Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement No. 101131706.
Bourban, M., Lenzi, D., Sørensen, M. et al. Convergences and Gaps between Environmental Ethics, Climate Ethics, and Research Ethics: A Scoping Review. Sci Eng Ethics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-025-00575-8
RE4GREEN (2025). Gap analysis of research ethics and integrity resources for R&I in general and new climate and environmental technologies in particular. Deliverable D1.3, RE4GREEN project, Horizon Europe, Grant Agreement No. 101131706
