TOWARD AN EXPANDED SCOPE OF RESEARCH ETHICS COMMITTEES: INTEGRATING ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE ETHICS
ModulesTOWARD AN EXPANDED SCOPE OF RESEARCH ETHICS COMMITTEES: INTEGRATING ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE ETHICS
By the end of the micro-module, learners will be able to:The main goal of this module is to enable learners to integrate environmental and climate considerations into Research Ethics Committee (REC) review by recognising their broader environmental, societal, and long-term implications within existing research ethics principles and review processes.
- Explain why environmental and climate considerations are becoming relevant to research ethics and the evolving role of RECs.
- Identify environmental and climate-related ethical considerations that may be relevant when reviewing research proposals.
- Apply a simple reflection approach to incorporate these considerations into existing REC review practices without creating unnecessary additional procedures.
What is this about?
Background & Evolution of RECs
Research Ethics Committees (RECs) were originally established to protect the rights, dignity, and well being of human participants, particularly within medical and health-related research. Their core procedures and review practices developed in response to concrete risks associated with biomedical experimentation, with a primary focus on informed consent, the proportionality of risks and benefits, and the protection of vulnerable individuals. Over time, ethical review in research has broadened beyond individual participants to include animals, communities, and society at large, reflecting growing awareness of the social, distributive, and long-term impacts of research activities. In parallel, environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss have increasingly been recognised as factors that shape human well-being and societal resilience. Environmental and climate ethics have therefore emerged as a relevant extension of contemporary research ethics, grounded in the interdependence of human and ecological systems.
The institutionalisation of ethics review has, however, developed unevenly across disciplines and national contexts. While RECs are firmly established in biomedical research and in parts of the social sciences, this is not the case across all research domains. In many technical disciplines, engineering fields, and parts of the environmental sciences (especially where research does not involve direct interaction with human participants) formal institutional REC structures are weakly institutionalised or absent. Even where RECs exist, their review practices do not always systematically address environmental or climate considerations.
As a result, research activities with potential environmental or climate impacts often fall outside established ethics review practices despite their ethical relevance. Deliverable Findings from RE 4GREEN D1.31 confirm that existing research ethics and integrity guidance largely treats environmental considerations peripherally, and that training resources for ethics reviewers rarely address environmental or climate ethics in a structured way. These developments highlight a gradual expansion of ethical expectations in research, alongside persistent gaps in how environmental and climate considerations are reflected in ethics review practice. This underlines the need for clear, proportionate, and supportive guidance that helps RECs integrate such considerations into existing review processes, without altering their core role or increasing administrative burden.Normative Shift: The Environment in European and International Research Ethics Frameworks
European and international research ethics frameworks increasingly recognise environmental protection and sustainability as integral components of responsible research conduct. This reflects a broader understanding that environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss are not external to research ethics, but are closely connected to human well-being, societal resilience, and justice.
At the European level, the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity2 explicitly includes respect for the environment and ecosystems as part of responsible research practice across disciplines. Similarly, the revised Declaration of Helsinki (2024)3 introduces an explicit requirement for medical research to be designed and conducted in ways that avoid or minimise environmental harm and promote ecological sustainability. While the Declaration of Helsinki is specific to medical research, it reflects a wider normative shift that links environmental harm to ethical responsibilities such as assessment, responsibility, and justice. risk–benefit Within the EU research governance framework, this normative shift is further operationalised through Horizon Europe ethics requirements and the application of the Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) principle. The forthcoming European Commission Guidance Note on assessing and managing risks of environmental harm in EU-funded research provides practical support for applicants, beneficiaries, and ethics evaluators in identifying, assessing, and mitigating environmental risks across the research lifecycle. By explicitly linking environmental harm to established ethical principles such as scientific quality, social value, justice, and proportionality, the Guidance Note confirms that environmental and climate considerations form part of ethical appraisal rather than a separate or optional concern. Taken together, these developments indicate that environmental and climate ethics are already embedded within the normative foundations of European and international research ethics. The challenge for ethics review is therefore not to introduce new ethical principles, but to support the consistent and proportionate integration of these existing expectations into ethics review practice, in ways that are feasible across diverse research contexts.
ALLEA. https://doi.org/10.26356/ECOC 3World Medical Association.
World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Participants. JAMA. 2025;333(1):71–74. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.21972From Ethical Expectations to Ethics Review Practice: Gaps and Challenges for RECs
European research ethics policy increasingly recognises environmental and climate considerations as ethically relevant. Horizon Europe ethics requirements 4 , the application of the Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) principle, and the forthcoming European Commission Guidance Note all confirm that potential environmental harms should be identified and addressed as part of ethical appraisal. In practice, however, these expectations are not yet consistently reflected in ethics review processes. This gap is partly rooted in the historical development of RECs.
REC mandates, expertise, and review tools were largely shaped in response to biomedical research and research involving direct human participation. As a result, ethics review frameworks are generally better equipped to assess immediate and individual-level risks rather than indirect, cumulative, long-term, or environmentally mediated impacts. Environmental and climate considerations may therefore be addressed unevenly or implicitly treated as falling outside the core scope of ethics review
These challenges are particularly visible in research involving complex infrastructures, advanced technologies, or data-intensive methods, such as the use of artificial intelligence, where environmental impacts may arise through energy use, resource consumption, or downstream effects. They also arise in contexts where environmental risks or burdens are unevenly distributed across or generations, intersecting with broader questions of vulnerability and justice that are not easily captured through traditional human-subject risk frameworks.
Taken together, this reflects a misalignment between expanding ethical expectations and the practical tools and support currently available to RECs, rather than a lack of ethical awareness. Addressing this gap does not require new ethical principles or additional approval layers, but rather proportionate, REC-facing guidance that helps integrate environmental and climate considerations into existing ethics review practices in a consistent and context-sensitive way.The RE4GREEN Perspective: Expanding the Scope of RECs
From the RE4GREEN perspective, “expanding the scope” of RECs should not be understood as introducing new legal responsibilities, formal powers, or additional layers of ethics approval. Rather, it refers to supporting RECs to address environmental and climate considerations that are already recognised as ethically relevant within European and international research ethics frameworks, but that are not yet consistently operationalised in ethics review practice.
RE4GREEN emphasises that ethics review should remain proportionate, supportive, and appropriately authoritative in nature. Integrating environmental and climate considerations into REC practice is intended to encourage early ethical reflection, transparency, and responsible methodological choices, within the context of established ethics review and approval processes, without constraining scientific freedom or innovation and without increasing administrative burden for either researchers or RECs. In this sense, RECs are not expected to act as environmental regulators, but to ensure that ethically relevant environmental and climate issues are identified, assessed, and addressed where appropriate as part of their existing review and approval responsibilities. At the same time, RE4GREEN recognises that RECs cannot be expected to address environmental and climate ethics in isolation. Effective integration depends on a broader institutional ethics ecosystem that provides access to appropriate expertise, guidance, and support, and that situates ethics review within wider research governance structures. From the RE4GREEN perspective, supporting the integration of environmental and climate considerations into ethics review involves a limited number of practical enablers:
Clear recognition that environmental and climate risks may be ethically relevant, allowing such considerations to be addressed, where appropriate, within the existing scope of ethics review. • Access to guidance and training to support REC members in identifying and assessing environmental and climate-related ethical considerations alongside risks to human participants, animals, and society. At present, such materials are limited and further resources are needed. REC members are encouraged to consult the list of resources provided at the end of this guidance document, as well as the RE4GREEN training micromodules available via the Embassy of Good Science.
Integration of environmental and climate prompts into existing review tools, such as templates, checklists, or guiding questions, to support consistency and transparency without adding procedural burden. At present, such tools are limited and further development is needed. Readers are encouraged to consult the REC Environmental & Climate Ethics Reflection Tool presented in the next section as an illustrative example. Taken together, this approach aims to strengthen the capacity of ethics review to respond to environmental and climate-related ethical challenges, while remaining fully aligned with existing research ethics governance and appraisal frameworks.Proposed REC Environmental & Climate Ethics Review Reflection Tool
This section presents a proposed reflection tool to support RECs in identifying and considering environmental and climate-related ethical issues during ethics review. The tool is voluntary and illustrative and is intended to complement the European Commission’s Guidance Note on assessing and managing risks of environmental harm in EU funded research by translating its principles and questions into a REC-focused format that can be used within existing ethics review and approval processes. While the Commission Guidance Note primarily addresses applicants, researchers, and evaluators, the reflection tool is designed to support RECs in structured ethical reflection, without introducing new procedural requirements or additional layers of review.
1. Relevance screening (threshold question)
REC members should ask:
a. Does the proposed research have actual or foreseeable environmental or climate impacts, either:
i. directly (e.g. emissions, resource use, pollution, biodiversity impacts), or
ii. indirectly (e.g. policy influence, technological deployment)?
b. If yes → environmental and climate ethics review should be part of the ethics appraisal.
2. Research topic and purpose REC members should ask:
a. Does the research topic itself raise risks of environmental harm or ecological injustice?
*Note: For example, the Guidance Note highlights that research related to rare earths may raise environmental concerns.
b. Could the research contribute to:
i. increased greenhouse gas emissions,
ii. iii. iv. v. biodiversity loss, pollution, depletion of natural resources, unequal environmental burdens across communities or generations?
c. Are potential environmental harms proportionate to the expected scientific and societal benefits of the research?
3. Research methods REC members should assess whether:
a. The methods chosen are unnecessarily resource intensive.
b. Lower-impact alternatives (e.g. simulations, reuse of data) were considered and, if rejected, whether the justification is ethically adequate.
c. Projects using resource-intensive methods (such as AI) describe their computing and energy needs and any measures to limit them.
4. Research practices and operations REC members should consider whether: a. The project is expected to have a significant carbon footprint
b. (Where relevant) laboratory or operational practices take into account: i. use of disposable materials, ii. iii. hazardous waste, energy and water use.
c. Whether sustainability measures (reduce, reuse, recycle) are embedded in the project organisation.
5. Risk–benefit and “Do No Significant Harm” (DNSH) REC members should ask:
a. Has the applicant identified environmental risks and proposed mitigation measures?
b. Are these measures credible, proportionate, and monitorable?
c. Does the project plausibly comply with the DNSH principle?
d. If environmental harm is unavoidable:
i. is it ethically justified?
ii. iii. is it minimised? is it transparently acknowledged?
6. Justice, inclusion, and intergenerational considerations REC members should consider:
a. Are environmental risks or burdens unevenly distributed (e.g. disproportionally affecting vulnerable communities)?
b. Were affected communities or stakeholders meaningfully considered, where relevant?
7. Oversight, monitoring, and conditions REC decisions may include:
a. Requesting additional environmental risk documentation,
b. Requiring mitigation or monitoring plans,
c. Recommending the involvement of environmental experts, whose primary responsibility is to consider the environmental impacts of the research,
d. Imposing ethics requirements related to sustainability during project implementation.
The proposed tool should be understood as an illustrative example of the types of questions that may support ethical reflection. Importantly, a range of relevant guidance documents, self-assessment tools, and review checklists addressing environmental and sustainability aspects of research ethics already exist at European, national, and institutional levels. These resources provide a strong foundation that RECs can draw on, adapt, and combine to suit disciplinary, institutional, and national contexts. Readers are encouraged to consult the resources listed below for further guidance.List of Resources
List of Resources:
| Resource | Type of resource | Origin/issuing body | Primary target audience | Scope, focus & relevance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethics Review Checklist for Use of Gene Drive | Ethics review checklist | iRECS (Horizon Europe project, Grant agreement ID: 101058587) | RECs, ethics reviewers | Provides a structured, REC-facing checklist addressing ecological risks, long-term ecosystem impacts, uncertainty, reversibility, and governance of environmental harm. Offers one of the clearest operationalisations of environmental ethics within formal ethics review processes. |
| TechEthos D5.4 Criteria for Ethical Review by RECs in Emerging Technology Research | Analytical report with recomm endations | TechEthos (Horizon 2020 project, Grant agreement ID: 101006249) | RECs, policymakers, ethics organisations | Analyses structural and substantive challenges faced by RECs when reviewing emerging technologies, including climate engineering. Highlights difficulties in assessing long-term societal and environmental harms and calls for REC-specific guidance and capacity-building. |
| Checklist – JRF Ethics Committee | Ethics self assessmen t checklist | Johannes-Rau Forschungsge meinschaft (JRF) – Ethics Committee (Germany) | Researchers (indirectly RECs) | Prompts researcher reflection on ethical, societal, and environmental aspects of research, including sustainability considerations. |
| How to Complete Your Ethics Self Assessment (Part 7: Environment & Safety) | Guidance document / ethics self assessmen t tool | European Commission (Horizon Europe) | Horizon Europe applicants; researchers; ethics reviewers; | Mandatory ethics self-assessment guidance for Horizon Europe applicants. Part 7 operationalises environmental and safety considerations. |
| Environmental Sustainability as an Ethical Issue in Intensive Care Research | Peer reviewed academic article | Springer (medical ethics & clinical research literature) | Clinicians, researchers, ethics scholars | Frames environmental sustainability and climate impacts as ethical issues in medical research, strengthening the normative basis for integrating environmental considerations into ethics discourse, but does not provide governance mechanisms or REC review tools. |
| DFG Sustainability Guide for Research Processes | Guidance / best practice document | Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft (DFG) | Researchers, research institutions, funders | Provides practical recommendations to reduce environmental footprints across the research lifecycle (e.g. energy use, mobility, procurement). Strong on sustainability practice, but largely disconnected from ethics review procedures or explicit REC mandates. |
