“All of us in academia and society need to join forces and do more to slow climate change and stop allowing biodiversity loss on a vast scale,” says Professor Dirk Lanzerath, Director of the German Reference Center for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) at the University of Bonn and coordinator of the RE4GREEN project. “In particular, researchers like us have a huge responsibility in this regard that starts right from the research process and when we’re selecting our research topics.” The EU’s RE4GREEN project, for which funding has now been secured, is about raising awareness of these issues even among young researchers and making this a key focus of the ethical responsibility shouldered by research institutions such as universities. Besides the DZRE, the University of Bonn is also represented in the project by its Faculty of Agriculture, its Center for Life Ethics and its Sustainable Futures Transdisciplinary Research Area.
Technical innovations and other research initiatives have the potential to do just as much harm as good as far as climate change and biodiversity loss are concerned. On the one hand, for instance, making targeted use of artificial intelligence in high-precision agriculture can help reduce the need for pesticides and cut water consumption. On the other, applications of this kind rely on server farms, which generate a high level of emissions, and on the mining of precious metals, which is harmful to the environment. “Up until now, ethical problems in this context have only been tackled superficially by European researchers,” Lanzerath says.
In particular, RE4GREEN is looking at incorporating insights from climate and environmental ethics to supplement existing principles of research ethics in order to help bring about an environmentally conscious shift in society in an interdisciplinary way that spans all sectors of the economy. The University of Bonn is coordinating the efforts of the 15 institutions involved, with universities from Japan, South Korea and South Africa joining partners from within the EU. The project has secured total funding worth €3 million over three years.
The EU has already taken its first steps toward making environmental aspects an integral part of research ethics. One example is the “Do No Significant Harm” principle, which is intended to ensure that no material social or environmental objectives are obstructed through institutional action. According to the researchers working on RE4GREEN, however, any more tangible demands in terms of environmental and climate ethics are only being considered to a limited extent at present in the European Research Area. They claim that efforts to encourage a more sustainable or “greener” way of doing business are rarely put into practice due to a lack of clarity over which measures can be regarded as beneficial and which innovations deemed expedient.
RE4GREEN is attempting to provide future research projects with some guidance in this regard. For instance, the outcomes of the ongoing debate on environmental and climate ethics are to be reviewed and translated into a set of practical guidelines. Ethics training is set to make it easier in the future for those involved to make sound decisions on these problematic areas. “We need a practical ethics framework that preserves and promotes core ethical principles while also ushering in a swift and effective green transformation within the European Union,” says Mihalis Kritikos, Policy Analyst at the European Commission. The EU has identified a need to raise awareness of climate and environmental aspects when conducting research and to maintain it at a high level over the long term through appropriate training. This will first require key ethical problem areas to be established so that they can be transferred to existing applications that are relevant to the environment.
One unique feature of RE4GREEN is the work being done in “social labs,” where groups of people affected are to be actively involved in the research process so that perspectives are not limited to the merely academic and results are obtained that can be put to everyday use. The social labs are to cover six areas in total: health, culture, inclusive society and homeland security; digital affairs, industry and outer space; climate and mobility; energy; food, bioeconomy, agriculture and environment; and soil, water, oceans and natural resources. An international advisory board made up of leading figures with extensive expertise is on hand both to support RE4GREEN and to make sure that a broader range of views is represented in the social labs.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA3ac5OPI2Cx4kTRv5uODLU3l6d7Bz7PQ
