Can Clinical Ethics Survive Climate Change?

The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care (2004) argued that the obligation to protect nature must be a core principle of bioethics and that the environmental harm of health-care practices should be taken seriously. In the two decades since, the accelerating pace of climate change and environmental decline has strengthened the moral case for reducing the environmental costs of health care. Nevertheless, mainstream bioethics has until recently neglected these vital issues. In response, a field of clinical environmental bioethics is emerging that applies concepts and measures of sustainability to such key clinical ethical issues as humanizing technology, setting limits, caring for the dying, respecting patient wishes, and allocating resources justly. Bioethical analysis of these and other issues can support just and humane health-care adaptation to climate change. Health-care adaptation in turn plays an important role in helping communities and nations adapt to the inevitable forward march of climate change. This essay offers two recommendations: (1) establish a climate transition commission for health-care adaptation to climate change with bioethics participation, and (2) strengthen advocacy for health-care reform by uniting it with climate activism.